telling news stories

Ben Bradlee says storytelling will be the salvation of journalism:

JIM LEHRER: But do you think that the newspapers, faced with this decline in circulation, should reexamine what they’re doing?

BEN BRADLEE: They’re examining, reexamining it. Boy, that’s topic A. Every, every paper you go to, they’ve just had a meeting and they’re discussing what to do about falling circulation. And there’s one word is the answer.

JIM LEHRER: What is it?

BEN BRADLEE: Stories.

JIM LEHRER: Stories?

BEN BRADLEE: Good stories.

JIM LEHRER: So, when you say stories, what stories are they not doing, kinds of stories that they’re not doing?

BEN BRADLEE: Well, I mean, they’re just well written stories, some story that makes you, you know, say I’ll be damned, that’s a good story.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. I didn’t know that kind of thing.

BEN BRADLEE: Yeah, I didn’t know that or that’s beautifully written or I feel really better for having read that. That really piqued my curiosity.

It’s vague—he doesn’t say how these stories will be told or transmitted, or by whom—but it’s a start.

I agree with him. Even frantically busy or distracted people who are not predisposed to listen to or watch “the news” are captivated by stories. I’ve talked about this before (here).

Susan Goldberg, executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News, got way more specific than Ben Bradlee when she spoke to the graduates of the Medill School of Journalism last week. She addressed the real issue—how to engage today’s audiences, who already know the news by the time they read the newspaper:

Our industry needs to get over the idea that news has to be told in a traditional way, in a traditional newspaper, to “count” as real journalism.

Readers have been telling us for a long time that much of what we do, and the form in which we do it, is capital-B boring to them. The trouble is, we haven’t listened. Until now.

We finally have stopped hanging up on our readers, literally and figuratively. Whether we call them readers, viewers, listeners, audience or, that dirty word, customers, we finally are asking them what they are interested in. We’re studying their actions online. We’re engaging with them in blogs. We answer their questions in real-time Q and A’s. …

Now I must admit that you can learn a lot of funny things by studying readers’ habits online. There is an amazing amount of interest in that naked guy stuck in the chimney. People like breaking fluff – sightings of Angelina and Brad and Jennifer. And they’re addicted to our “American Idol” blog.

But readers also are interested in weightier topics. In San Jose, the most clicked on items almost always include stories about technology and breaking news. We need to understand and adapt to readers’ desires for both kinds of fare, the heavy and the light.

For years now, readers also have told us they already know a lot of our major national and international news headlines before the paper hits their doorsteps. Even locally — where we have the greatest chance of providing exclusive content — readers may already know the result of the city council vote.

To remain relevant, we need to offer far more than this commodity news.

Our truest and strongest value now and into the future will not just be to tell readers what happened, but what it means. Not just to react, but to interpret, to explain, to analyze. We should not shy from telling people why they should care, or be afraid to connect them emotionally to our stories.

Read her entire address (via Romenesko).