A good story, well told

The sale of Knight Ridder has created a whole new round of discussion about the future of newspapers. See, for example, this lengthy and comprehensive essay by Nancy Nall, former News-Sentinel columnist, which explores the whole range of issues faced by the dead-tree press these days about as well as it can be done. (Via Indiana Policy Review through Fort Wayne Observed.)

If you've read my observations on the issue, you know I've been all over the map, optimistic one day and the next convinced that all ink-stained wretches are headed almost immediately to the welfare line. Believe it or not, I'm in one of my more hopeful phases now, despite the fact that the McClatchy Co.'s announcement that it plans to re-sell The News-Sentinel instead of keeping it as part of its KR acquisitions has created more uncertainty than ever among Fort Wayne's evening-paper journalists.

The knock on newspapers these days is: How can they keep hoping to lure readers with their outmoded 24-hour news cycle when new technology, especially the Internet, allows people to find out anything they want to almost instantaneously? But consider movies, which, using that logic, should be obsolete by now. People can turn on the TV anytime they want, cruise through a couple of hundred cable channels and find any kind of entertainment they're in the mood for. Why in the world should they slow down and pay attention to a single work for two hours? But they do, because they expect to see something special, crafted by by people who have a vision and the talent to produce it. Or, a better example: All the information in the world is available to us; we can pretty thoroughly research a given topic from our computers in a day. So why do we keep putting nonfiction books on the best-seller lists? Because there are still people who can focus on one topic and write about it compellingly enough to make us want to follow their path through all the research.

Newspapers can triumph despite the obvious advantages of their competition just as nonfiction writers and moviemakers have. But they can't do it just by continuing to dish up the same old news in the same old way. They have to reconnect with their communities, give their readers a unique vision, a compelling focus. We can only do that if we question everything we do and reinvent ourselves from the foundation up.

No paper that I know of has done that. We nibble at the edges. Periodically, some editor will say something like, "We need to stop covering school board meetings so much and actually send reporters into the schools." Or there will be research that says we need to do more "useful" stories or stories about "people like us" or 100 other things. Or, the worst of all, we'll convene a focus group to "ask readers what they want." Newspaper readers don't know what they want to read anymore than music lovers know what they want to hear. Listeners just know a great song or moving symphony when they experience one. If music were determined by focus groups, there would be no Beethovens or Jimi Hendrixes or Hank Williamses; it would all just be mind-numbing elevator melodies.

I don't know exactly what newspapers need to do to get away fom elevator music and back to operatic greatness, but I know where to start: Throw away the framework we've been using for -- well, just about forever. I was struck by one passage in Nancy's essay where she talked about producing a business page. If space is tight, and you're short on designers, you get through it by coming up with a template and sticking to it.

Newspapers have had a template for the whole product, and they've been sticking to it. There is the local news section and the sports section and the features section (formerly known as the women's section) and the editorial page and the business page. Throw in some comics and a crossword puzzle, scatter the ads throughout in a predictable pattern (except for the tiny-print classifieds that are kept together) and top it off with a front page that highlights three to five stories of the thousands that are available (with a centerpiece that takes up a quarter to a third of the page, simply to make something dominant, whether it deserves to be or not), and you've got a product that's not terribly different in form or function from what it was 50 years ago. What other kind of company would still be trying to get away with that?

If we want to be compelling and vital and needed and, more important, desired, we can't keep trying to cram everything we learn and want to tell people about into the same half-dozen categories that we've always used. Too many things don't fit into the categories so neatly and will fall through the cracks. Somebody, somewhere, has to have the courage -- or the foolhardy recklessness -- to throw all that away and start from scratch. If a single moviemaker or book writer can draw the interest of millions of short-attention-span navigators through the modern world, surely a large group of people trained in information gathering and dissemination can figure out a way to get the attention of a single community.

Maybe one writer becomes the community's official biographer; he follows one person around for a month and writes his life story in installments, chronicling what he encounters and thinks about it; next month, another person. Perhaps another writer just goes and talks to people wherever they gather in public, whether in bars and restaurants or bowling alleys and beauty parlors or park picnics and city council hearings. One writer is assigned to pay attention to what every other news and information provider in town is doing -- including TV, radio, the blogosphere, the mayor's PR person and maybe even the cranks who show up at people's doors with petitions.

Those are just three quick ideas from one person. If a newspaper could stop thinking in terms of the same old beats (the education reporter, the courts reporter, the city hall reporter) producing stories that have to be fit into the same old categories in the same old sections, imagine the ideas 20 or 30 people could come up with.

Journalism -- not unlike movies and books and songs -- has always been about one thing and one thing only, and it will continue to be about that single thing, no matter how far technological progress will push us into "multi-platform" presentations: a good story, well told. Newspapers that figure that out will survive, in one form or another, because readers will find them. Even those rotten younger generations who are flocking to the Internet read when they get there.

Those of us in the newspaper business just need to foucs on finding the good stories and telling them well. That requires finding a new way to engage the community whose stories we would tell. That community isn't in the template we've been using.