BOOKS BRIEFLY

BY GILLIAN STEWARD

The Power of Story

In a world of content-providers and information overload,
people need storytellers. It’s no accident that journalists often refer to
their work as “stories” even though the word story is usually associated with fairy tales, folk tales and fiction.

For the important thing about a story is not its relationship to concrete reality but its narrative drive: that mysterious force that pulls us along to the
end, always with the hope that when we get to the end we will have an understanding that we didn’t have before. And surely that is the work of journalism.

But in a world of bulletin board newspapers, instant Internet publishing,24-hour televised news coverage, and pompous news anchors, it’s often
hard to find the story, or the narrative drive, in the avalanche of self-serving promotion, facts, statistics, quotes,opinions, clips and sound-bites.

And just as we get involved in one story,we are taken to another
before we know how the first one ends. In fact,we may never find out how the first one ends because it can be so quickly dropped from the news agenda.

In October,when I watched some of the coverage
of the Washington sniper on CNN, I was struck by how much of what we experience as “journalism”is not a “story.” Most of the minute-to-minute coverage
was simply people on television thinking out loud. They jumped from one unsubstantiated conclusion to the next, much like people do when they are
talking to themselves or with friends in a coffee shop.

I found the total effect quite frightening, because as a viewer I didn’t know what to believe from one second to the next. The threads of information were not sorted and pulled together in a way that helped the viewer understand what was
going on.

For that I turned to the Globe and Mail’sWeb site or print edition and then thanked the gods for welltrained editors and writers who know how to sort
through the avalanche of information, pull out what is essential and weave it together in an engaging, narrative style. As a reader I found out in a few minutes what would likely have taken me hours to piece together if I had stuck with CNN.

This is not meant as a put-down of radio and TV news media in favour of print. Rather, it is a plea for story — for journalism to return to its roots. Because it seems to me,now more than ever, people need journalists who know how to sort through the whirlwind of information, stimulation and entertainment, separate the wheat from the chaff, and weave the material into stories that give us a greater understanding of our power to affect change in the world around us.
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There are certainly more tools than ever that enable us to be super detectives (as is evident in many of the articles in this special edition of Media which focuses on computer-assisted and investigative journalism). And our findings can be
distributed faster and further than ever.

But while people can quickly absorb pellets of information, I would venture to say narrative has a far deeper impact. There’s a reason that people are intrigued
by mystery novels, detective stories, biographies, classic tales like David and Goliath.We want to know how things turn out. We want to look at the stories of other people and discover the lessons in living so we might avoid the pitfalls and recognize the most propitious paths.

This doesn’t mean journalists have to reduce everything to simplistic pap. Even complicated investigative stories can use strong narrative drive to engage listeners and readers.

Margaret Atwood is no fan of modern-day journalism. But in her book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2002, $27.95) she writes about narrative in a way that could easily be applied to both print
and electronic journalism: “Writing is writing down, and what is written down is a score for the voice, and what the voice most often does — even in the majority of lyric poems — is tell, if not a story, at least a mini-story. Something unfurls,
something reveals itself. The crooked is made straight…There’s a beginning, there’s an end, not necessarily in that order, but however you tell it, there’s a plot.”

The lack of narrative and plot is the main reason most people find academic writing utterly boring. Like much of what is relayed to us through various
media, academic writing assumes we are robots into which information can simply be uploaded and retained. Good stories, on the other hand, engage us as full human beings.

I attended a writing workshop given by Lynne Van Luven (my predecessor as Media magazine’s books editor) at a CAJ conference in Victoria. She was so inspiring that people were literally jumping out of their seats with questions and comments. They wanted to write like the writers she had brought to their attention. They wanted to use narrative, plot, poetic style — all the things that go
into a good story. But more than one said that when they got back to the newsroom that would be next to impossible. Editors simply didn’t want that
kind of writing. In the anthology she edited — Going Some Place (Coteau, 2000. $18.95) — Van Luven compares creative non-fiction writing to a raucous
magpie that swoops across the landscape and picks up whatever it needs to “advance/enhance its sallies into narrative. “Yet, despite its flights of fancy, the magpie of creative non-fiction is a hardliner when it comes to actuality — it does not invent its stories, it simply tells them dramatically.”

Today’s newsroom managers may not want those kinds of stories. But I suspect there’s a real hunger for them out there in the real world.

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Gillian Steward is Media magazine’s books editor.

Mini-Reviews

CKUA: Radio Worth Fighting For by Marylu Walters. University of Alberta Press, 2002, $29.95.

The story of the fiesty Alberta public radio station that almost died after it was
privatized a few years back.The government - appointed overseers pocketed most of the money the Klein government gave them to guide the station through the transition period and the station literally went off the air due to lack of funds. But that was not the end of the story. Loyal staff and listeners rallied to the cause, resurrected Edmonton -based CKUA and turned it into successful subscriber-based radio.

Walters tells the whole story from 1928 on and captures the personalities, politics
and passion of the people behind Alberta’s renegade radio station. G.S

In the News: The Practice of Media Relations in Canada by William Wray Carney. University of Alberta Press, 2002, $24.95.

This is a book designed for people in the public,private and voluntary sector
who know very little about the news media but need to know more if they are going to do their jobs properly. It contains lots of practical advice about how to approach reporters, turn events into a news story,navigate difficult interviews,and write grabby press releases.

Although Carney, a former journalist and now an experienced political staffer in the premier’s office in Saskatchewan,he manages to avoid casting news media as puppets to be manipulated. Instead, he urges public relations practitioners to help the news media do their job rather than hinder them. Journalists wanting to
know more about the tricks of the trade used in the PR business will also find this interesting. G.S..