By Russell Frank
Special to Poynter.org

Let's start over. Let's quit covering planning commissions and budget hearings. Let's tear down the inverted pyramid. Let's start doing the kinds of stories that readers want to read and reporters want to write.

Come on baby, let's narrate.

I have attended several orgies of narrative journalism in the past few years: the Wilmington Writers' Workshop in 1998, the Aboard the Narrative Train conference in 2000, and its successor, the Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference in 2001. All the leading practitioners attend: Jon Franklin, Ron Suskind, Tom Hallman, Anne Hull, Gay Talese, Tom French, Susan Orlean, Tracy Kidder, Rick Bragg, Chip Scanlan, Walt Harrington, Jacqui Banaszynski.

Each riffs off the same theme: We need to write stories that pack an emotional punch. Such stories are right under our noses. Readers are less interested in cops, courts and councils than they are in what's going on in the mind of a 12-year-old boy as he ties his own necktie for the first time.

"We're missing the stories that move our readers," says Hallman of The Oregonian.

These exhortations to write "stories about people as they face the challenges of everyday life," as the editor's note to Hallman's stories puts it, are exactly what the earnest young reporters in the audience want to hear. They don't want to write meeting stories. They respond with derisive laughter to snide references to budget stories and inverted pyramids and leads that end in "police said" and the "to-be-sure" paragraphs that Suskind says all Wall Street Journal stories have to have.

One problem, though: those poopy old editors who still think public affairs are important don't want their reporters to spend endless amounts of time hanging around on the perimeter of other people's lives. The narrative conference speakers acknowledge that it's tough to sell editors on a budget line that reads: "After a knock-down, drag-out fight, a man brings his sweetheart a bouquet." He should have murdered her.

Work these stories on your own, the speakers advise. Offer them to your editors when you're done and if the stories are good and readers call to say they cried their hearts out –- which seems to be the goal of many narrative journalists –- your editors may let you do more of them.

Now don't get me wrong. I agree that much news-writing is dull and fails to tell us about "the way we live now," to quote both the Trollope novel and the name The New York Times Magazine attaches to its regular features. I applaud the rise of narrative journalism. I attend the conferences not to collect ammo for diatribes like this one, but because I want to try my hand at the kind of writing the speakers are doing.

Narrative journalism conferences are such lovefests, though, that I find myself wanting to defend those budget stories, to strike a blow for keeping the news in newspapers. And where, I'd like to know, are the ethics discussions? How do 800 reporters, editors and assorted writers of nonfiction devote an entire weekend to narrative journalism without talking, except in passing, about privacy or fabrication or the work that doesn't get done when reporters are spending six months hanging around a high school while the kids rehearse "West Side Story?"

The Reporter Under the Bed

Done right, narrative journalism is an enormous invasion of privacy. The fact that the source has granted permission for the reporter to poke around in his or her life doesn't begin to cover the ticklishness of the reporter-source relationship.

For one thing, reporters take advantage of people's "good manners," their knee-jerk inclination to speak when spoken to. Among the reasons why reporters prefer face-to-face interviews to phone interviews is that it's harder to blow off someone who is looking you in the eye. Victims of tragedies especially may be too distracted to fend off an inquiring reporter or to deflect intrusive lines of inquiry once the interview has begun. Issues of deference may also come into play when the request for access reaches across barriers of gender and ethnicity.

According to the usual reporter-as-therapist justifications, people want to unburden themselves. They're grateful, perhaps even flattered, by the reporter's interest in their tale of woe. Well, yes, but most people spill their guts to loved ones. Reporters listen sympathetically, but they're also saying to themselves, "Yes! This is great stuff!" Then they write their stories, let the flood of tears wash over them, dry off, and move on.

Is this exploitative? I don't know, but the issue of "imperfect consent" –- a term I learned from Nieman conference director and founder Mark Kramer –- should be discussed.

And isn't there something slightly creepy about the reporter who lurks in the background while his sources go about their business? We know he's there, but since he's not a character in the story, we can't see him. It's like he's hiding under the bed –- with permission, of course, but still…

The Reporter as Fabulist

There are two types of narrative journalism. One is predicated on hanging around and observing and listening. The other is predicated on interviewing and examining documents. Many stories use both approaches either by turns or in combination. Problems arise when reporters who use the second approach try to give their accounts the same immediacy as those based on the first approach.

The way they do this, of course, is by leaving out the attribution. The reconstructed event becomes indistinguishable from the observed event.

The practice is clearly deceptive. The questions that need to be addressed are whether readers are aware of the deception; if aware, whether they are troubled by it; and if troubled, whether they are mollified by an editor's note that discloses that an account is a reconstruction and indicates which unattributed bits of information come from what source.

As Chip Scanlan has noted, Wall Street Journal editors set a new standard for reconstructions in October. They attached a 200-word "Note on Sources" to a story that reconstructed the experiences of several people who were in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. The note says, in effect, that none of this is fiction; every unattributed factoid is in fact attributable to a source.

It thus acknowledges that readers may be less willing to trust reporters than they were before the fabrications of Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass and Patricia Smith came to light. If so, it is a curious thing that at the very moment when journalistic credibility is being called into question, a growing number of journalists are abandoning the verbal assurances of their credibility.

Of course, there are counter-arguments to be made: One is that the main problem with today's newspapers is not that they're untrustworthy, but that they're boring. Readers want a good yarn. It's the media ethics professors who are punctilious about attribution (guilty as charged!).

Another is that attribution is no guarantee of factuality. A reporter with a mind to pipe quotes can just as easily invent sources to whom to attribute those quotes. Again, the point is that if people are going to convene from near and far to talk about narrative journalism, there could be and should be some good lively discussions of fabrication, conflation, interior monologue and the imposition of narrative order on messy reality.

The Narrative Reporter as Time Vampire

Narrative stories are resource-intensive. They consume a lot of space in the paper and they take a lot of time to report, photograph, write, edit and design. Judging from the blurbs on the Narrative Newspaper website, time invested on these projects seems to be selling point:

• Providence Journal staff writer G. Wayne Miller spent almost two years reconstructing the story of open-heart surgery.
• This family gave nearly unlimited access to Michelle Roberts of The Oregonian for more than 11 months.
• Sacramento Bee reporter Darragh Johnson and photographer Bryan Patrick spent months following four homeless teens.

Given finite resources, especially at smaller papers, newsroom managers must ask if they are the best use of staff time and column inches. What events or issues won't get covered while the reporter and photographer are putting the package together? What won't get into the paper on the day the 120-inch whopper on a Little League team runs?

The faithful in the flock counter that narrative journalism is not about to usurp all the resources from conventional news. If anything, getting narratives into the paper continues to be a struggle. All they're saying is that, given newspapers' inability to keep up with the electronic media when it comes to breaking news, their best hope for retaining or even winning back readers is to do what they do best, namely, to tell stories.

They also say a narrative doesn't have to be a magnum opus. Mark Kramer has written that any conventional news story can be improved by the addition of "narrative moments" or "narrative touches." At the 2001 Nieman conference, Rick Bragg claimed that a metaphor –- he cited his own description of a dead child as a pearl falling from a broken strand of pearls –- could be considered narrative. It was a lovely image, all right, but at that point one has to ask whether narrative journalism, like civic journalism, doesn't simply mean good journalism.

Though Kramer says that the debate of narrative vs. conventional journalism is based on a false dichotomy, I remain troubled by the narrative journalism zealots' contempt for conventional news reporting. What does it say, not only about the state of American journalism, but about the state of American citizenship, that governance is of so little interest?

For all its literary pretensions, narrative journalism's penchant for the maudlin and the macabre situates it closer to daytime television than either news or the best fiction. The best practitioners do a masterful job of edging right up to the waters of bathos without getting wet; the copy editors who write their headlines slosh right in.

Consider the movie-blurb heads on Hallman's Oregonian stories: "You're on the edge of a whole new life. But moving ahead means leaving so much behind." "The crime was horrific and the loss profound, but forgiveness is not just for the forgiven." Oy.

A reporter friend came away from one of the narrative journalism conferences thinking all narrative stories are interesting and all conventional news stories are dull. She was going home to write about the downtown business district. How, she wondered, was she going to do a narrative story about that?

With feeling, I sang, nothing more than feeling.