From Dan Conover comes a great essay titled “Narrative is dead! Long live narrative!”
In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the piece Conover is responding to: a Washington Post story complaining that “in our modern click-and-skim world, there’s dwindling time and space for the expertly crafted narrative.” It’s a lament I’ve heard before, whether from people mocking USA Today for its charts-and-graphics approach to the news, or from people under the impression that Web users are nothing but a bunch of espresso’d-up 14-year-olds with ADHD and the attention spans of gnats.
There are two problems here:
1. The assumption that in order to be serious journalism, a piece must consist of inches upon inches of dense prose.
2. The assumption that inches upon inches of dense prose, even when they’re appropriate (and I do think there are times when they are), can’t grab the attention of today’s reader.
Here’s Conover:
The current mainstream assumption is that we have to dumb down journalism to survive in the digital era. Dave Kindred seems to have reached that conclusion and accepted it in a column that made me want to reach through the screen and shake him. The answer isn’t dumbing down, and Baseball Hall of Fame sportswriters ought to be the first people to understand this.
Did the invention of the box score ruin sportswriting? No? Why not?
Could it be that human beings process different types of information in different ways, with different needs at different times?
… Do you get it now? Today’s revolution isn’t about killing narrative, but about inventing box scores for actions that don’t take place in ballparks.
Narrative isn’t dead. If we see less of it, that’s because we’re finally figuring out that there are times when it’s appropriate and times when it isn’t. And I believe readers will continue taking the time to read long-form narrative — if we’ve proven that we respect their time enough that we won’t ask them to sit through 2,000 words of copy unless it’s really worth it.