‘It’s OK to feel’: The emotionality norm and its evolution in U.S. print journalism

Narrative journalism and occupational norms

The study of narrative journalism has significantly expanded over the past two decades but a systematic literature review by Van Krieken and Sanders (2019: 2) found that while researchers have offered ‘a broad palette of concepts associated with the genre’, this collaborative effort has not yet generated ‘a consistent view of which of these concepts define the genre’s essence and distinguish it from other genres’. Moreover, as academic inquiry often focused on historical studies in the context of the United States, it mostly explored the biographies of particular journalists or described the textual characteristics of narrative nonfiction as a genre (Connery, 1992, 2011; Hartsock, 2000; Sims, 1994, 2007). Little attention has been dedicated to the institutional and organizational conditions of narrative journalism (e.g. newsroom culture, business pressures, changing news values, etc.), to the point that Pauly (2014: 590) called for a ‘a more institutionally situated history of literary journalism to place alongside our studies of writerly technique’.

Building on Pauly’s intervention, I would argue that not only do we need more institutionally situated accounts of how narrative journalism evolved, but that we pay particular attention to the reflexive process between social conditions and aesthetic conventions. News and storytelling as historically contingent forms of journalism are rooted in specific social practices of reporting as well as institutional boundaries and knowledge claims. At the same time social interactions between journalists and sources are shaped in patterned ways by objectives of creating particular stylistic effects (see Wilson, 2020). Put differently, ‘the news story is as much an institutionalized expression of journalism as the institutionalized practice of journalism is defined by the constraints of symbolic forms’ (Schmidt, 2019: 7). What this means for the examining the relationship between emotion and narrative journalism is to identify why this particular configuration came into being and how it evolved over time. Here I turn to the concept of occupational norms and how it helps elucidate this process.

As previous scholarship has established that narrative journalism is a particular journalistic practice that evolved over time and that emotionality is one of its constitutive elements, then the objective of this study is to specify the sources, processes, and discursive configurations of emotionality as an occupational norm. By norm, I mean both an authoritative standard for a particular form of journalism (i.e. a model to aspire to) as well as principles of practice binding journalists to guide, control and regulate proper and acceptable behavior. My attempt builds on a conceptual definition from Schudson (2001) who discussed objectivity as an occupational norm in an effort to explain a particular ‘shift in literary style and normative orientation’ (Schudson, 2001: 158). Inspired by sociological theories from Weber and Durkheim, Schudson identified four measures that indicate the presence of an occupational norm. Adapted to the case of emotionality, then, the following dimensions indicate the presence of emotionality as an occupational norm: (1) journalists articulate emotionality as a moral ideal and express allegiance to it in formal and informal ways; (2) scholars can detect emotionality as occupational routine; (3) content analysis of journalistic texts indicate the systematic use of emotionality as a stylistic device and (4) the norm is defended by adherents when it is openly challenged and criticized.

My study will not address all of these dimensions equally because in some areas extant scholarship has already established important evidence. For example, a number of scholars conducted content analyses to demonstrate shifts in literary style (Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997; Benson, 2013; Boczkowski and Mitchelstein, 2013; Fink and Schudson, 2014; Patterson, 1993; Stepp, 2002; Weldon, 2007). Although their terminologies differ, findings from these studies clearly point towards an increase of emotionality as a systematic storytelling device. Furthermore, as already mentioned, Wahl-Jorgensen coined the term ‘strategic ritual of emotionality’ to express key characteristics of this different literary style in newspapers. Building on these insights, then, my research question becomes: how did journalists in U.S. newspapers collectively construct ideals, practices, and justifications for advancing narrative journalism as an acceptable and desirable norm of emotional storytelling between the 1960s and the 1990s?

Conceptualizing moral ideals

Influenced by the pioneering work of the New Journalists in the 1960s (Pauly, 1990, 2014), major U.S. newspapers not only began experimenting with narrative writing styles but started to shift the focus of news coverage towards an affirmation that consumer choices should animate the content of news (Nadler, 2016). These trends were interlinked and created opportunities for some newspapers to combine narrative techniques with emotional engagement focused on topics beyond the traditional purview of news journalism. A key player in this development was the Washington Post under the leadership of Ben Bradlee, who had become the executive editor 1968. On January 6, 1969 it launched the Style section with the explicit goal to disrupt traditional news reporting. This section not only replaced the Women’s pages but was also designed to introduce magazine-like writing dedicated to lifestyle, arts, and culture. As David Laventhol (1968), the architect behind the new section, wrote in a detailed outline:

People would be stressed rather than events, private lives rather than public affairs. Profiles and interviews would be used frequently. Direct reports, with lots of quotes and hard, specific detail, would be emphasized. The tone would be realistic, not polyannish [sic]. Clarity would be the guiding principle of the writing style; it would be bright without being flip; sophisticated without being snobbish; informed without being ‘in’.

This emphasis on ‘people [. . .] rather than events’ signaled a shift towards a more emotionally-engaging news content and, in the words of Hanitzsch and Vos (2018), the focus on ‘private lives rather than public affairs’ illustrated an interest in harnessing the power of telling emotional stories not just for ‘entertainment and relaxation’ but also ‘inspiration and a sense of belonging’. At the same time the tone of these stories would not be sensational (i.e. as in tabloid papers) but ‘realistic’, effectively drawing from a rich literary tradition in the 19th century based on what Connery (2011) called the ‘paradigm of actuality’. In doing so, leading editors at the Post and at the Style section legitimated and validated emotional aspects of news stories without compromising on the hard news angle. The years-long process of launching and refining a new section in the newspaper, also allowed editors and reports to articulate the moral ideal of emotionality in formal ways. As the early Style editor Thomas Kendrick (1975: 22) described this approach for the Style section 6 years after its launch, ‘Style’s focus is squarely on the human dimension, a dimension that somehow got cut wafer-thin in the who-what-when-where-why formula that seemed nearly computer programmed by the ‘60s. Now, [. . .] Style writers are striving to gather facts without excising their human context, freeze-drying their emotional impact’. Although the new style of Style initially provoked resistance from some journalists, audience members and even publisher Katharine Graham (Schmidt, 2017), it eventually became the ‘prototype for daring, literary-minded newspaper feature sections throughout the country’ (Limpert, 2015) and Bradlee’s ‘clearest personal monument’ (Fallows, 1976: 80).

Despite Style’s cultural cachet, however, some of its writers were dissatisfied with the lack of institutional recognition within the journalism industry. To them, narrative writing as emotional storytelling was not taken seriously enough and often denounced as human interest journalism, a fact that, in their view, was indicated by the absence of a Pulitzer award for feature writing. ‘The age of the mere color stories and human-interest sidebars ended when Style was born’, wrote Style-writer Henry Allen (1976) in a memo to Bradlee. ‘Feature writers get read, get famous, get people buying newspapers, and should get their own Pulitzer’. Bradlee, then a member of the Advisory Board on the Pulitzer Prizes, was immediately supportive of this request, but correspondence from fellow board members indicates that there was considerable resistance. Some editors feared that this ‘would touch off an avalanche of entries, many of them of dubious quality. Every feature about a fireman rescuing the neighbor’s cat would come in. Also the usual features about babies, bright children, rural teachers, reformed alcoholics and fallen stars’ (Hills, 1977). Responses like this indicate that the emotional resonance of feature (i.e. narrative) journalism was narrowly defined in sensational and deemed of less public importance. Eventually, however, the Advisory Board established a new Pulitzer Prize category of Feature Writing in 1977 and adopted a definition and description that was worded by Eugene Patterson: ‘For a distinguished example of feature writing giving prime consideration to high literary quality and originality’. ¹ In a way, emotionality in narrative journalism was now accepted and rewarded if it met the standards of literary quality and originality.

In the late 1970s, the new Pulitzer Prize was just one indicator of a growing recognition of feature writing and emotional storytelling. It was under the umbrella of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) that various efforts converged and took form in debates on a variety of platforms such as conferences, trade journals, newsletters, and newsroom experiments. Initially, editors at ASNE were merely interested in providing resources, infrastructure, and professional recognition for enhancing the craft of writing in U.S. newspapers. Through these efforts, however, they also created a space for editors and reporters alike to reflect on the purpose and possibilities of news writing. For example, when Jim Hoge of Chicago Sun-Times/Daily News was asked what he would like a new award for good writing in newspapers to merit he responded that award-winning pieces ‘should reflect the emotional and intellectual range of journalism. We enlighten, provoke and entertain’ (Winship, 1978: 12). This invocation of emotion as a central component of news writing is exemplary for conversations that collectively crafted normative ideals advancing the purpose of emotional engagement through storytelling. Taken together, this sustained lobbying for elevating the emotional resonance of news writing brought emotional storytelling to the forefront of attention and validated it as a legitimate and desirable practice.

Crafting occupational routines

Adopting narrative techniques of emotional engagement in daily news production, however, required ‘boundary work’ (Carlson and Lewis, 2015) and actual efforts to not only conceptualize and internalize moral ideals, but also to enact a new set of values into daily news production. As much as certain editors actively promoted new formats, styles and content–, others perceived these changes as a turn towards ‘last-gas “daily magazines”’ and instead advocated for ‘a hard line for hard news’ (Shoquist, 1980: 11). Moreover, some editors and observers had the uneasy feeling that narrative writing signified a triumph of style over substance, a turn towards ‘soft and sexy’ and the danger that reporters ‘will spend more time searching for flashy metaphors and dramatic stories than for verifiable facts and legitimate news’ (Shaw, 1981: 28). This tension between narrative journalism’s possibilities and its pitfalls would become a central issue with the Janet Cooke Scandal in 1981 (Eason, 1986).

Cooke was a reporter at the Washington Post’s and had to forfeit her Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing because it was discovered that she had fabricated her award-winning story of an 8-year-old heroin addict in Washington, DC. The scandal was not only a major embarrassment for Bradlee and the Post (although not for the Style section because Cooke worked on the metro desk), but also crystallized the journalistic meta-discourse surrounding emotional storytelling. It illustrated conflicted attitudes and approaches with regard to narrative journalism in newspapers, setting up a debate about the opportunities and challenges of expanding the emotional spectrum of newswriting. For the Wall Street Journal, for example, the scandal raised ‘some broader and troublesome issues’, including the question ‘Are the competitive pressures of big-city newsrooms such that style and form are overtaking substance?’ (Wall Street Journal, 1981) and Jonathan Friendly (1981) of the New York Times wrote:

Many reporters and editors criticized what has come to be called the ‘new journalism’, in which the writer presents as emotionally true composite characters who do not exist, vivid scenes he never saw and bright conversations he never heard. They said they were worried that the cachet such writing had been given would lead younger reporters in particular into trying to present it as actual reportage.

These quotes, illustrating a synthesis of viewpoints within the newspaper industry, indicate the stakeholder’s discomfort with narrative techniques in daily news journalism and reflected a deep-seated suspicion that narrative style could never be reconciled with journalistic substance. At the same time, this controversy provided an opportunity for defending emotionality as an emerging occupational norm and constructing standards of proper occupational routines. Subsequently, journalists engaged in a collective effort to negotiate the rules of emotional storytelling, purge inappropriate or unethical practices, and thereby renew journalistic authority. For example, while ‘emotionally true composite characters’ were a staple of new journalism stories, newspaper journalists generally rejected these literary techniques (see e.g. Clark, 1982) and instead articulated appropriate ways of expressing emotions by sources and strategically using emotions in their storytelling.

This effort of collectively crafting occupational routines around emotional storytelling again played out within the realm of ASNE. In 1978, the organization began organizing annual contests to recognize the finest writing in American newspapers with the goal to identify and reward excellent writing in newspapers. The award-winning stories were published by the newly established Modern Media Institute (later Poynter Institute) as a series called ‘Best Newspaper Writing’ and also contained interviews with award-winning writers, where they talked about, among other topics, the art and craft of emotional storytelling. ² Essentially, these journalists formulated shared practices and formed a body of knowledge, discursively enacting emotionality as a moral ideal and constructing corresponding occupational routines.

Several journalists advocated for expanding print journalism’s boundaries beyond routinized, formulaic news writing. They wanted to explore the emotional core of how events and experiences affected people in their attitudes and their behavior. Richard Zahler, one of the ASNE award winners and later a writing coach at the Seattle Times, said that the ‘experience of literature’ helped to find that balance between information and emotion. ‘I’m a strong believer in story telling as story telling [sic]’, he said. ‘The thing has got to move and develop. It’s got to have detail and real people and feeling and emotion’ (cit. in Clark, 1981: 73–74). See also a comment by Carol McCabe of the Providence Sunday Journal: ‘I’m writing stories. I’m using them as characters in stories. They’re telling their own stories. They come to life because they are alive, and I try to employ language skillfully so they are not just pieces of type. Most of us are into working with characters in the same way that fiction writers do’ (cit. in Clark, 1980: 115). These quotes from the early 1980s illustrate a point that Wahl-Jorgensen (2013: 130) made about award-winning stories in the 1990s: ‘[J]ournalists rely on outsourcing of emotional labor to non-journalists – the story protagonists who are (a) authorized to express emotions in public, and (b) whose emotions journalists can authoritatively describe without implicating themselves’.

However, while the expression of emotions was and is often heavily policed and disciplined in many areas of news production, some narrative journalists subverted this logic and instead embraced the chance of becoming personally and emotionally involved. ‘The whole idea is feeling with the protagonist or network of people in your story’, said Joe Nawrozski of The News American in Baltimore. ‘It’s OK to feel. If you don’t feel, here comes the inverted pyramid again. [. . .] I’m not ashamed to say that I feel some empathy with the people I write about’ (cit. in Clark, 1984: 238). For Cynthia Gorney, then the West Coast reporter for the Washington Post Style section, reporting narrative stories often included ‘mucking around in people’s tragedies’ and the challenge was ‘not to go crazy with grief but at the same time respond the way a human being ought to respond’. She won the features award in 1980 for a series of stories, one of which was a profile of Sirhan Sirhan, the murderer of Robert F. Kennedy. When describing her reporting style, she indicated that it sometimes clashed with traditional notions of journalistic detachment. ‘I cry a lot on stories. The first time it happened I thought, Now what kind of reporter are you? You’re supposed to be tough and aloof’ (cit. Clark, 1980: 61). What Gorney was struggling with, it seems, was that emotional involvement typically disqualified professional reporters. Yet, as she and others were discovering, in the process of reporting narrative stories, allowing emotions was not only crucial for establishing trust with sources but also for gaining insights (Kleinman and Copp, 1993).

What these interviews illustrate is that the aesthetic objective of telling literary-minded stories required personal emotional engagement with sources and then the ability to render these insights into emotionally relatable accounts. Reporters used references to literature and literary practice as rhetorical devices to differentiate their assessments and uses of emotionality from sensational and tabloid forms of journalism. Moreover, these are early examples of processes described by Pantti (2010) and others, highlighting how emotionality is being reconciled with professional norms of objectivity.

Negotiating and normalizing roles

By the early 1990s, emotional storytelling had come of age. After more than a decade of promoting and implementing narrative journalism in newspapers writing improvement efforts, conversations about emotional storytelling were no longer an exotic topic but a regular feature in professional interactions. Though narrative journalism moved from a niche phenomenon to a standard practice across many newspapers throughout the industry, it nevertheless required specific favorable conditions both in individual newsrooms and in terms of institutional support. And it required collective action to negotiate and normalize emerging role conceptions (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017) of emotional storytelling.

In this section I will briefly take a close-up look at one newspaper, the Oregonian, which gradually became a success story for using narrative journalism in daily news writing. In particular, I will demonstrate how a key ingredient for the paper’s recognition was its deft articulation, implementation, and justification of emotionality as an occupational norm. Then I will shift the interpretive lens and briefly sketch how a new constellation of professional conventions, conferences, and workshops helped construct and normalize a common identity among practitioners, effectively normalizing emotionality as a core competence of narrative journalism.

The Oregonian was an old-fashioned newspaper before editor Sandra Mims Rowe took over its leadership in 1993. Over the course of a few years, however, she made the paper a shining example of compelling writing and thorough reporting. An important part of that success derived from adopting and sustaining narrative journalism and emotional storytelling, the contours of which were developed by Jack Hart, a senior editor who eventually became writing coach and one of three managing editors. A close look of his interactions with the newsroom by examining his regular newsletter Second Takes provides crucial insights into what normalizing emotionality as moral ideal and occupational routine looked like on the organizational level.

Hart had started Second Takes originally as a training tool and debate platform. At the same time, this newsletter also functioned as a rhetorical device. In his role as editor in charge of staff improvement, Hart used the newsletter to persuade reporters and editors of specific goals, strategies and writing philosophies. He was attuned to the writing coach movement and promoted narrative writing as a way to elevate the quality of the newspaper. After the arrival of Sandy Rowe, narrative writing received the full editorial support of the newsroom leadership. Rowe also brought a particular vision to the newspaper. She wanted to kindle a ‘fundamental rethinking of what our obligation is to our reader, and how we can best fulfill it’ (cit. in Fibich, 1994: 28). Her core conviction was that the paper needed more emotion and more human touch. Jack Hart blended these ideas with his promotion of narrative writing and communicated how and why Rowe wanted to see more emotion in the paper. ‘She wants readers to feel the life of their community in their newspaper’, he wrote. ‘She wants the paper 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’ (Hart, 1993: 1). Hart also acknowledged that ‘most of us have to work a lot harder at capturing the humanity that’s missing in the typical news story’ (Hart, 1993: 1).

Hart offered two tests that reporters could use to determine whether their writing illuminated the emotional dimensions of their news stories. The first test for reporters was to ask themselves whether they ‘introduce[d] us to a sympathetic character being involved in an emotional situation’ (Hart, 1993: 2). Then they should evaluate whether they were ‘evoking the kind of detail that allows readers to get close enough to feel emotion directly. Emotion, as it turns out, cannot be felt secondhand’ (Hart, 1993: 2). Hart further underscored this latter aspect when he laid out the specific techniques that narrative writers use to convey emotion and meaning. ‘[T]hese writers seldom bother to tell us what anything means. They get out of the way and let the action line wend its own way through the unadorned descriptive detail. They point you in the right direction and let you experience the emotion yourself, which is the only way you can experience emotion. And, in the end, you know exactly what everything means. You can feel it’ (Hart, 1993: 3).

One of the writers at the Oregonian who was considered a master in the art of telling emotional stories was Tom Hallman. He fully embraced an emotional approach to reporting and writing the news.

As a writer, I think I am an emotional writer, and I want to make my readers feel the same emotions I felt when I was out doing this story and so then I want to use words or scenes to recreate that same feeling in my readers. I view myself as a guide taking a reader by the hand and saying, ‘Come enter my world and let me show you around’. In some stories I open the door very wide for a reader to come in and live with the person and in others I feel like I am taking them through an apartment house just opening one door at a time and letting them look into the room briefly and then moving on to another door. So when I’m reporting, I’m very aware of how I feel, and I’ve learned to trust my voice. As I’m out there reporting I think, ‘This scene makes me feel that way. Why am I feeling that way? And then looking for the details that I can use to make someone who is not there see the same way I did’ (American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1997: 221).

After years of promoting narrative journalism, however, Hart also grappled with fundamental challenges of emotional storytelling, In 1998, one article in Second Takes cited Barbara King, director of editorial training at The Associated Press as saying, ‘What began as a good idea for humanizing stories has often become its own cliché. So, let’s use the writing device, but let’s keep using it more carefully and more deliberately by making the people we use more integral to our story’ (Hart, 1998: 5). As a result, Hart (1998: 5) calibrated the call for putting people in stories and listed good reasons for doing so, ‘It’s absolutely essential that we humanize our stories; Cultural diversity. We need it on every level and from every corner; To bring in different points of view; To bring color into our stories, particularly with quotes, and in speech patterns; Because our best stories show, instead of tell; To increase readability; As an opportunity to develop our writing skills’. With this defense of emotionality in news stories and by articulating guidelines for proper use, Hart had come full circle with respect to normalizing emotionality as occupational norm. The case of the Oregonian, then, demonstrates how emotionality was articulated as a moral ideal, shaped into occupational routines and defended as an appropriate norm.

The Oregonian could have remained an isolated example of implementing emotional storytelling in daily news production had it not been embedded in a growing community of practice, a ‘storytelling movement’ among U.S. journalists that ‘fostered relationships between proponents of the form, galvanized the imagination of young reporters, canonized theory and practice, and established narrative writing as an institutional fixture in American journalism’ (Schmidt, 2019). Of particular importance in the late 1990s and thereafter was a conference on narrative journalism at Boston University and then at Harvard hosted by the Nieman Foundation. The location conferred legitimacy and prestige and the program allowed practitioners to discuss theory, practice, and ethics of narrative journalism and emotional storytelling. These conversations illustrate how this community discursively constructed the practice of narrative journalism and imbued it with a civic purpose. Practitioners were using the concept of narrative journalism to demarcate the boundaries between serious journalism and emotional manipulation. This point is best illustrated by George Getschow from his introduction to The Best American Narratives 2012, and this quote also encapsulates how thoroughly emotionality and narrative journalism had become intertwined.

‘The best nonfiction narratives have an emotional goal—to move people and effect change. That can only happen when the story connects with the deepest core of a reader’s psychological and spiritual being. The connection must be strong and deeply felt, forming an emotional bond between the writer, the reader, and the subject. Making that connection may be the hardest part of the narrative craft’ (Getschow, 2012: 4).