Abstract
Rewriting the Newspaper is a thoughtful and well-researched account of the narrative news movement in daily newspapers. Thomas R. Schmidt, assistant professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, provides a rich story within a sophisticated conceptual framework. Journalism scholars will find it a welcome addition to scholarship on the recent history of journalism and its struggle to do meaningful work.
Narrative journalism, according to Schmidt, unlike the earlier dominant form of objective reporting, features an opening anecdote rather than a summary lead, organizes its exposition in chronological order, and emphasizes an emotional appeal to engage its readers in a fundamentally human story. He also associates it with “anthropological and sociological” approaches to news. This description encompasses a lot of terrain. Still, no one can deny that there has been an identifiable narrative journalism movement and that it has had a deep impact on the way that news organizations operate.
Schmidt calls his approach “cultural institutionalism.” The “institutional” part comes from scholars like Timothy Cook, who situate news as part of a larger institutional order, but he sees institutionalists as overemphasizing structure at the expense of the agency of journalists. To balance that, he invokes scholars like James Carey, Michael Schudson, and Barbie Zelizer, who analyze journalism as a cultural practice.
Schmidt’s starting point is the New Journalism of the 1960s. The first moment he offers an original account of is the creation of the Washington Post Style section, which occupies the bulk of Chapter 2. Familiar characters—Ben Bradlee, Katharine Graham—in a familiar setting make this a compelling episode, but Schmidt draws deeper connections to a wider movement in the news industry, noting initiatives at the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and St. Petersburg Times, and exploring especially the gender dimensions of the movement. At the Washington Post and other newspapers, it colonized the Women’s section and drew resistance from longtime readers and advertisers. At the same time, it is difficult to separate narrative news from feature writing or simply paying attention to the quality of the writing.
Chapter 3 details institutional actors that propelled narrative journalism in the 1970s and 1980s. The hero is Roy Peter Clark, hired by the St. Petersburg Times as the first writing coach in a daily newspaper. Clark came from an academic career in literature at Auburn University. He assimilated to the newspaper world and became immensely influential through his work at the Poynter Institute and his editing of the annual anthology Best Newspaper Writing, which began in 1979. National organizations like the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) and Associated Press Media Editors (APME) became promoters of narrative journalism, seeing it as a way to cultivate new readers in an atmosphere of high profits but eroding market position in a competitive media environment.
Schmidt argues against critics who see narrative journalism as a “gimmick designed to advance the ‘upscaling’ of newspapers.” But he recognizes that leaders in news organizations were intensely aware that they were losing readers to television. Jack Hart, one of the key movers at The Oregonian, whose embrace of narrative journalism anchors Chapter 4, said the point was to “deliver the same laughter, anger, sorrow, and excitement that packs folks in the movie theaters, rivets them to the tube, and sells slick magazines by the millions.” Narrative journalism was a writer-friendly way to square the business needs of increasingly corporate media with the cultural expectations of increasingly upscale readers.
Schmidt says this entailed embracing subjectivity and emotional engagement. Schmidt does not explore the social assumptions behind this subjectivity. He cites leading figures calling for emotional investment in reporting, but does not cite examples of reporters displaying their own subjective involvement. One could say they claimed the kind of universal subject position that critics of objectivity ascribe to traditional journalism. When critics used spectacular failures like the Janet Cooke scandal to push back against deviations from empirical norms, defenders argued for accuracy and fairness. Perhaps this movement did not reject traditional epistemology, but hoped to enhance it.
The book ends with narrative journalism triumphant. Schmidt describes the National Writers Workshops and conferences hosted by the Nieman Center at Harvard University, cites scholarship showing transformation of story styles on newspaper front pages, and notes the success of the movement in prize competitions. Chapter 5 makes a strong case that narrative journalism offered a new news logic, embodied a new media regime, and repositioned the news as a cultural institution. But he also nods to the collapse of the newspaper industry and hints at another study on the afterlife of narrative journalism, in a diminished print world.
The book is convincing and deserves a wide readership. I think it also has implications for the public journalism movement, which Schmidt does not touch on. Its champions also looked for a way to enhance engagement and establish a community of feeling. Public journalism was also criticized as a marketing gimmick and attacked as “feel-good” reporting eroding the position of “hardhitting” objective journalism. Both movements concerned themselves with cultural upheaval and social fragmentation; both invoked James Carey and inhabited the Poynter Institute. Both overestimated the power of individual pieces of journalism and were unable to protect journalism from its larger media environment.
Digital news has a different notion of engagement. It moves at a more staccato pace and has proven voracious in its consumption of popular attention and advertising revenue. I hope Schmidt carries this study further a generation.