Page-views suggest we crave short, informative text, ‘clickbaited’ with images of half-naked or bleeding bodies – even faster variations on the TV soundbites I once helped locate on tape. The marketplace has something to tell us. But to say that the 24/7, quick-and-dirty news cycle exists because people want it is incomplete logic. Poor people in a blighted urban food desert – devoid of garden or grocer but rife with Burger Kings and Dairy Queens – don’t consume fast food every day because their bodies are hungry for French fries. They consume it because they’re hungry for food. Its lack of nutrient density often means they have to keep eating – creating a confusing 21st century conundrum for the evolved human body: to be at once obese and malnourished.
In a media landscape of zip-fast reports as stripped of context as a potato might be stripped of fibre, most news stories fail to satiate. We don’t consume news all day because we’re hungry for information – we consume it because we’re hungry for connection. That’s the confusing conundrum for the 21st century heart and mind: to be at once over-informed and grasping for understanding.
I’ve begun college writing classes by asking students to name the first image that comes to mind at the term ‘atomic bomb’. Nearly every answer, every time, is ‘mushroom cloud’. They’ve seen that black-and-white photograph in high-school textbooks alongside brief paragraphs about mass death. But they can’t remember much about it. Who dropped the nuclear weapon? What year? In what country and for what reason? They memorised it all once, but it wasn’t relevant enough to their lives to stick.
Then the students read an excerpt from Hiroshima Diary (1955), the personal account of the Japanese physician Michihiko Hachiya, who in 1945 was enjoying his quiet garden when he saw a flash of light and found himself naked.
‘A large splinter was protruding from a mangled wound in my thigh, and something warm trickled into my mouth,’ Hachiya wrote. ‘My cheek was torn, I discovered as I felt it gingerly, with the lower lip laid wide open. Embedded in my neck was a sizable fragment of glass which I matter-of-factly dislodged, and with the detachment of one stunned and shocked I studied it and my blood-stained hand. Where was my wife?’
As he runs to help himself and others, Hachiya sees people moving ‘like scarecrows, their arms held out from their bodies’ to avoid the pain of burnt flesh touching burnt flesh. His attention to fact befits a man of science, but in rendering the sights, sounds and smells of the bomb’s wake, Hachiya is an artist. He relays the tale chronologically and with little judgment, allowing readers to find their own way to meaning. After reading his account, students look stunned and speak softly. Though generations and continents removed, they recognize Hachiya's fears as their own; 'atomic bomb' has zoomed in from detached concept to on-the-ground reality.
We have the chance now to reach such understandings through digital journalism. Recent years have seen a surge of timely, immersive, nonfiction commissioned and relayed by digital media startups such as Atavist, Narratively, Guernica and many others. Meanwhile, think tanks such as the Nieman Storyboard at Harvard and the Future of Digital Longform project at Columbia are examining the integration of time-honoured story and its exciting new formats.
On journalistic training grounds, a slower joining of reporting and artistry is taking shape in college classrooms: writing programmes in English departments and fine-arts schools increasingly honour non‑fiction as a genre alongside fiction and poetry; such concentrations most often cater to memoir, but a handful of schools now offer robust opportunities in reportage, profile-writing, the essay. However, journalism schools, 15 years after a curriculum shifted beneath my feet, show little sign of seeking the artistic wisdom of creative programmes. The most formative course of my college training – a reporting wringer in which each of us wrote five news pieces per week for the lauded student paper while working all semester on one long, carefully crafted, front-page feature – no longer exists as a core requirement. Yes, today’s multimedia training demands contributed to that curricular decision, but journalism has long feared that ‘creativity’ means ‘making stuff up’ – a self-destructive fear, since a news story without creativity isn’t a story at all.
True story comprises two strands, spiralling: the specific and the universal. The earthly and transcendent, literal and metaphorical, tangible and intangible. The binding agent is the act of storytelling – often by the reliable devices of description, setting, structure, metaphor, character, but always through thoughtful ordering of words, images, sound. When we sever that bridge between objective fact and subjective meaning in the interest of speed or protocol, TV anchors awkwardly interview six-year-old witnesses to shooting rampages, and reporters convey military suicides as tallies in a descending order of deemed significance known as the ‘inverted pyramid’. This approach, though sometimes useful, ultimately desensitises or disturbs us. It fails to match the moment.
by Sarah Smarsh, Aeon | Read more:
Image: via:
In a media landscape of zip-fast reports as stripped of context as a potato might be stripped of fibre, most news stories fail to satiate. We don’t consume news all day because we’re hungry for information – we consume it because we’re hungry for connection. That’s the confusing conundrum for the 21st century heart and mind: to be at once over-informed and grasping for understanding.I’ve begun college writing classes by asking students to name the first image that comes to mind at the term ‘atomic bomb’. Nearly every answer, every time, is ‘mushroom cloud’. They’ve seen that black-and-white photograph in high-school textbooks alongside brief paragraphs about mass death. But they can’t remember much about it. Who dropped the nuclear weapon? What year? In what country and for what reason? They memorised it all once, but it wasn’t relevant enough to their lives to stick.
Then the students read an excerpt from Hiroshima Diary (1955), the personal account of the Japanese physician Michihiko Hachiya, who in 1945 was enjoying his quiet garden when he saw a flash of light and found himself naked.
‘A large splinter was protruding from a mangled wound in my thigh, and something warm trickled into my mouth,’ Hachiya wrote. ‘My cheek was torn, I discovered as I felt it gingerly, with the lower lip laid wide open. Embedded in my neck was a sizable fragment of glass which I matter-of-factly dislodged, and with the detachment of one stunned and shocked I studied it and my blood-stained hand. Where was my wife?’
As he runs to help himself and others, Hachiya sees people moving ‘like scarecrows, their arms held out from their bodies’ to avoid the pain of burnt flesh touching burnt flesh. His attention to fact befits a man of science, but in rendering the sights, sounds and smells of the bomb’s wake, Hachiya is an artist. He relays the tale chronologically and with little judgment, allowing readers to find their own way to meaning. After reading his account, students look stunned and speak softly. Though generations and continents removed, they recognize Hachiya's fears as their own; 'atomic bomb' has zoomed in from detached concept to on-the-ground reality.
We have the chance now to reach such understandings through digital journalism. Recent years have seen a surge of timely, immersive, nonfiction commissioned and relayed by digital media startups such as Atavist, Narratively, Guernica and many others. Meanwhile, think tanks such as the Nieman Storyboard at Harvard and the Future of Digital Longform project at Columbia are examining the integration of time-honoured story and its exciting new formats.
On journalistic training grounds, a slower joining of reporting and artistry is taking shape in college classrooms: writing programmes in English departments and fine-arts schools increasingly honour non‑fiction as a genre alongside fiction and poetry; such concentrations most often cater to memoir, but a handful of schools now offer robust opportunities in reportage, profile-writing, the essay. However, journalism schools, 15 years after a curriculum shifted beneath my feet, show little sign of seeking the artistic wisdom of creative programmes. The most formative course of my college training – a reporting wringer in which each of us wrote five news pieces per week for the lauded student paper while working all semester on one long, carefully crafted, front-page feature – no longer exists as a core requirement. Yes, today’s multimedia training demands contributed to that curricular decision, but journalism has long feared that ‘creativity’ means ‘making stuff up’ – a self-destructive fear, since a news story without creativity isn’t a story at all.
True story comprises two strands, spiralling: the specific and the universal. The earthly and transcendent, literal and metaphorical, tangible and intangible. The binding agent is the act of storytelling – often by the reliable devices of description, setting, structure, metaphor, character, but always through thoughtful ordering of words, images, sound. When we sever that bridge between objective fact and subjective meaning in the interest of speed or protocol, TV anchors awkwardly interview six-year-old witnesses to shooting rampages, and reporters convey military suicides as tallies in a descending order of deemed significance known as the ‘inverted pyramid’. This approach, though sometimes useful, ultimately desensitises or disturbs us. It fails to match the moment.
by Sarah Smarsh, Aeon | Read more:
Image: via:
