Writing Tools

Scrap the PowerPoints and the euphemisms. It's time for journalists to tell a new, more powerful story: the truth.

It goes something like this: "By making these changes, we think the Daily Blank will be a better paper. It will be leaner, more efficient, and will focus more on what our local readers say they need." In other words, they are going to lay off or buy out some of their best people to meet profit margins. The Big Lie is that this will make for a better paper.

But what if the manager said something like this: "I'm not going to lie to you. These cuts are devastating. I don't think they'll make us a better paper -- and neither do you. But this is not the first time the Daily Blank has faced adversity. It's only been three years since the day Hurricane Xena hit the coast. Do you remember that day? When we had no power or light? How some of us spent three days here at the paper living on bottled water and what we could get from the candy machines? How we had to manage our jobs and worry about our loved ones threatened by the storm? And what did we do against all that adversity? We put out the best newspaper in the state. Some of us helped deliver them to readers from the trunks of our cars. Don't tell me we can't meet this new crisis head on."

I got this idea from a 2003 essay I just read from the Harvard Business Review. It is titled "Storytelling That Moves People" and transcribes a conversation with screenwriting coach Robert McKee. The Review describes McKee as "the world's best known and most respected screenwriting lecturer" whose students have written or directed hundreds of hit films. But here's what's most interesting: McKee coaches business leaders on how to tell more powerful stories about their companies.

Truthful stories, not candy-coated, soporific PowerPoint presentations about the 10 ways the company will become twice as good after firing half the staff.

McKee argues that company leaders are better off telling stories, but only if they can learn what a real story requires:

Essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes. It begins with a situation in which life is relatively in balance: You come to work day after day, week after week, and everything's fine. You expect it will go on that way. But then there's an event -- in screenwriting we call it the 'inciting incident' -- that throws life out of balance. You get a new job, or the boss dies of a heart attack, or a big customer threatens to leave. The story goes on to describe how, in an effort to restore balance, the protagonist's subjective expectations crash into an uncooperative objective reality.

Think for a moment of how many journalists' expectations of what a good career should look like have crashed into a wall of diminishing resources and technological change.

"A good storyteller," argues McKee, "describes what it's like to deal with these opposing forces, calling on the protagonist to dig deeper, work with scarce resources, make difficult decisions, take action despite risks, and ultimately discover the truth."

I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that if you want to write a good story, create an interesting and likable character, and then spend the next 300 pages doing terrible things to him. Think Harry Potter.

Now think of all the inciting incidents that have shaken the stability of the news business: layoffs, buyouts, cutbacks, declining circulation, loss of classified advertising, increase in the cost of paper, the sale and dismemberment of Knight Ridder, Murdoch lurking in the wings of The Wall Street Journal, the loss of prestige and threats to credibility, and on and on and on.

What do we do with all that bad news? If we followed McKee's advice, we'd start telling each other and the world outside stories of how good journalists did great work against all odds.

I once heard James Carey, the late scholar of journalism and culture, draw this analogy between journalism and psychiatry (I quote him from memory): "When you go to a psychiatrist, he asks you to tell him a story. And he listens carefully to that story trying to hear the parts of the story that may be making you sick. His job is to help you tell another story about yourself, a story that will keep you well."

Then he turned to journalism: "The stories journalists are telling about themselves these days are stories about degeneration and decay. Journalists need some new stories that will make them well, stories about hope and aspiration."