Blog Post #5: Journalism
This week’s prompt is one that I have thought about in the practical context for some time, and not simply for this post.
I am the type of person who tells stories. I acknowledge that fully, and I understand that it isn’t for everyone – there is always a journey before a destination, and I enjoy the journey. In the sense of journalism, my original career intentions while beginning my college career was to find myself in news media working as a foreign correspondent (no not this one). Yes, that included building the individualized major of International Journalism in Text & Image. Admittedly hyperfocused, but it’s generalist enough in content to be applicable to a range of media careers, and I’m enjoying the process.
Over time, I’ve realized that such a position isn’t terribly practical – especially in the current global climate and job market – but significant aspects of the journalistic mindset stick with me. I structure most emails as an inverted pyramid, constantly have a notepad, and ask likely too many follow-up questions. But I also am comfortably a writer; creative nonfiction is my focus, and I’m currently weighing commitment to UNH’s MFA in Writing program or Emerson’s MA in Editing & Publishing. Both are operative directions for telling stories and relaying information, but neither is explicitly journalistic.
Journalism, to me, needs some form of narrative structure to truly convey the emotional impact of a story. A traditional inverted pyramid multi-interview story can be captivating, but can tend to read like the summarized minutes of a School Board meeting. By introducing narrative structure, and emphasizing the interviewees as characters with experiences rather than sources of information, the humanity of the story can be relayed in tandem with the factual account. The New York Times investigation regarding the Notre Dame fire exhibits this beautifully.
Self+Timer No. 13 | 11 Aug 2020
I was lucky enough to visit Notre Dame in August while backpacking during my time abroad on exchange. The air felt heavy with the emotional weight of the cathedral’s status. The colorful banners behind the hedges are artworks submitted by children all around France to show how they envision the cathedral being rebuilt and back to its glory.
People care about what other people experience, and it’s almost as though we want to empathize in order to understand a specific situation. Even when we consider other forms of popular media, the humanity behind the presented information is often what keeps our attention as viewers, such as morning talk-news shows, biopic films, and even content from creators on YouTube or TikTok.
As this conundrum has lived in my head for years at this point, I’ve found myself placing my own work within the space between journalism, art, and literature. In effect, I operate on the methodology that – barring emergency news communications – the emotional presentation of a story is equally as important as it’s factual presentation, be that in an instance of multimedia investigative journalism or an episode of Ru Paul’s Drag Race.
