Excerpt

Introduction

"There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible."
—Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

The billboard towering above the section of I-94 East heading from Milwaukee to Chicago read, “What’s Your Story?” and featured a close-up photo of a jacketed torso from chest to waist. At the top of the billboard in mid-December 2006 was the banner logo of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. A decade ago, would a newspaper billboard have posed the same question? Would a reader have cared enough to answer? And if a reporter had listened, chances are the story would not have ended up on the front page. Today it just might. Newspapers want your story. Newspapers have become story papers.

The front page is a peculiar product at once permanent and ephemeral. Nothing is as old as yesterday’s news, and nothing lasts longer in a reader’s memory or a reporter’s portfolio than front-page news. The type of news delivered in print today is dramatically different from that available even as recently as the start of the twenty-first century. The newspaper has become a portal for a stylized slow dance of information, not for the quick bursts of digests and info-nuggets a reader can get more quickly online or from broadcast.
Stories in newsprint have shifted into a more deliberate choreography of information, reaction, and participation. They are everyman stories.

“A newspaper is both a record and a reflection of its times,” Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. wrote in the introduction to The Century: History as It Happened on the Front Page of the Capital’s Newspaper.

In the one hundred years of front pages included in the Post’s commemorative book, feature stories were naturally part of the mix—such as the arrival of the Beatles in the U.S. on February 12, 1964, the 1906 wedding of Alice Roosevelt, and the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer. But features were not the mainstay of print news content as they are today. In this book I examine distinct changes in content, style, and sourcing in twenty American newspapers in the brief interlude from 2001 to 2004. I explore several cultural and economic reasons why the newspaper is so sharply different than even a decade earlier. This important conversation is superficially about media and more deeply about who we are as an audience of media.

The front page not only reflects the economic climate of the newspaper industry, it mirrors the editorial instincts of newspaper ownership and staff and also attempts to meet the needs and desires of readers and ultimately society. It is difficult to separate the business of newspapers from the real-life impact of newspapers on consumers; it is all one swirling cultural mosaic of story, fact, and appetite. My goal is to spark debate and to examine more closely why and how daily print news has so drastically in recent years altered the practices of daily journalists and the expectations of readers.

“Changes in media content are the most obvious effect of changes in the media industry,” David Croteau and William Hoynes wrote in their 2006 book, The Business of Media. “Through entertainment, arts, and public affairs programming, the media allow us to learn about the history, culture, and experiences of people different from ourselves, as well as reflecting our own interests and identity in their images and content.” The content of newspapers has been transformed by a shifting sensibility of what kind of story readers want when a stupefying avalanche of information is accessible, where that information is accessed and why. “If we accept that the media influence society (and are in turn influenced by it), then we can understand how significant changes in media structure and practices can alter not only media content but also the nature of the media’s influence on society,” Croteau and Hoynes wrote.

The changes I discuss in this book mark the heralding of what I call everyman news. The term is intended as nonsexist. I could have dubbed the genre “everyman and everywoman news,” but it is not as simple to say or remember. The trend toward this brand of democratic storytelling suits well the journalists, readers, and the broader American society at the beginning of the twenty-first century in an environment that reveres the individual’s contribution to media. After eighty years of nominating global influence-makers for Person of the Year, Time Magazine in 2006 nominated “you” “for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game. . . . But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.”

Everyman stories are about inclusion and a humanistic approach to the reporting of current events, not gender. They are about a society leaning toward personal storytelling, away from a reliance on factoids and news bullets. The kind of story in abundance now is as much about our tolerance—and desire—for the nonfiltered ramblings on youtube.com, as it is the expectation that the newspaper will speak to us as friend, not as civics instructor. We want to tell the newspaper our story and tell it well. “I think that’s what is going to end up happening when it all shakes down,” said Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute. “One of the differentiated products of the print paper can be the well-crafted story.”

This is a partial excerpt from the introduction. More to come.