In all this, Schultz’s invocation was one of the few times the term “business model” was used—again, from what I heard, anyway—at the Sheraton Boston this weekend. And that’s to be expected; financial concerns weren’t relevant to the conference’s main concern of the craft and the crafting of narrative. Except: “business model,” the term and the concept, was there. The thing hovered, wraith-like, throughout the weekend’s panel discussions and speeches. As participants spoke eloquently about “moving people through journalism” and the flattening force of compelling narrative (another specter was Joseph Campbell)…there it was. Jon Lee Anderson spinning exciting, charismatic yarns about his adventures in Bolivia and Iraq. (But what about the business model?) Gwen Ifill discussing the connection between a politician’s biography and our national identity. (But what about the business model?) Jenn Crandall describing the supreme trust required between herself and her subjects in creating her remarkable onBeing project. (But what about the business model?)
The tension, in this sense, between theory and practice, between church and state, between the ideal (this is what good narrative should look like) and the pragmatic (this is what good narrative can look like) suggests that now is the right time to question our assumptions—assumptions so commonly accepted that they’ve moved toward cliche—about the transcendent “power of narrative.” (What, exactly, makes narrative powerful? What about it is necessary and fundamental, and what about it is incidental? How can we put its power to use in new journalistic forms?) As Benton said during a talk on Saturday, the Web is engendering “a new openness to the kinds of things that we can deem journalistically acceptable.”
It certainly is. And we journalists, whether we’re literary or hard-news in our sensibility, reject—or, worse, ignore—that new openness at our own peril. Just as we ignore our industry’s financial woes at our own peril. Picasso could have spent hours—days—years—watching and framing and feeling the quiet undulations of the night sky; none of it would have mattered had he been unable to afford paint.
Take, again, Schultz’s “it’s not you, it’s the business model” declaration…which became, in some sense, the de facto motto of the conference overall. It’s a good line, to be sure, both simple and inspirational (with the added virtue, as they say, of being generally true). But it’s also reductive. Journalism’s current woes are much more complicated, after all, than the loss of print-ad revenue. Our problems are bigger than our business model. “We’re part of the problem,” said Maria Carrillo, managing editor of the (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot. “We’re telling stories the same old way.”
This is a time, then, not simply for reiterating time-tested journalistic values—although it is a time for that, too—but also for re-thinking those values. For reframing our assumptions about narrative. And for rewriting the story of journalism itself.
I've been to several Nieman narrative conferences and found them individually uneven and of varying quality from year to year. That's to say: Yes, even the best of the conferences included a fair amount of precious blather about the beatifying qualities of ... narrative. So I understand what seems to be Ms. Garber's general dissatisfaction with the lofty tone of some of the conference.
But from this story, I haven't a clue what happened at the conference this time around or what her problems with it actually are. I'm sure there could and should have been some panel discussions on how new business models or multimedia methods might better support narrative journalism.
But there is plenty of good narrative work going on in magazines, books (particularly; it's almost a golden age of nonfiction narrative book publishing), television (Frontline, anyone?), the Web (mediastorm.org, if you haven't seen it), film and even the better newspapers (yes, even now). I always thought the idea of this conference was to help sophisticated writers and editors teach and learn (almost always) very specific techniques for finding and telling stories that readers will love.
This piece, on the other hand, offers up a heaping serving of vague criticism, the meaning of which I could only guess wildly at. I haven't a clue to what the Web providing “a new openness to the kinds of things that we can deem journalistically acceptable” means. And the notion that journalists -- and, one supposes, other humans -- need in these days of the Internets to "refram[e] our assumptions about narrative" after the last several thousand years of framing it in the first place is certainly a diverting one.
It'd be nice to know what that reframing might entail. Perhaps we'll be shooting all the characters, burying narrative drive and burning Tolstoi out back?
I'm sorry. I just can't find the point to this story, hard as I look. And I was looking; I couldn't get free for the conference this year and really wanted a good account of its goings-on.
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#1 Posted by John Mecklin, CJR on Mon 23 Mar 2009 at 07:53 PM
Dear journalists-narrators!
I found this site just by chance, looking for other kind of info.The only thing I would like to suggest is the strange:) coincidence\resonanse between the title of the conference and the name of the river which flows on the other semisphere:),in Eastern Europe -- in Belarus and Lithuania,-- N(i)eman! At the beginning of AD era Ptolemey on his maps called\marked this river CRONON
#2 Posted by Svetlana, CJR on Tue 24 Mar 2009 at 05:05 AM
Maybe skip the narrative conference and head down to a basic writing class -- this story is unfocused, pointless and completely impenetrable.
#3 Posted by Paper Boy, CJR on Tue 24 Mar 2009 at 11:39 AM
Wonder if anyone ouched upon science in sci-fi, as pointed out by Dustin Hoffman.
Is there any need to be accurate in sci-fi....someone fantasized in his /her wild imagination about going to the moon to make the moon-walk possible....
#4 Posted by Kamal, CJR on Tue 31 Mar 2009 at 04:35 AM