There's an idea about the future of newspapers floating over the land and it goes like this: As more and more breaking news and information drives readers to Web sites, the newspaper of the future will have to change. It will become more up-scale in its audience and advertising, more selective, more focused, a little brainier. In some expressions, it will seem more literary, more creative, more visually exciting. Liberated of the need to break so much news, it will provide readers with analysis, context and meaning.
Think of NPR on paper.
Who will work for such a newspaper? It will have to be reporters, writers and editors who are comfortable with ideas, with theories, with abstractions. Pretty tough stuff for folks whose philosophy can be summed up: "Get the name of the dog!"
Almost a century ago, the great British scholar Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch advised his Cambridge University students to prefer in their writing concrete nouns and active verbs. Even in such an exalted academic setting, the professor proclaims a preference for the concrete over the abstract.
Three decades later, S.I. Hayakawa popularized the "ladder of abstraction," teaching us that there was nothing wrong or right about the concrete or the abstract, but that all language could be placed on a ladder that extended from one semantic end to the other. At the low end skips my 14-year-old Jack Russell terrier named Rex. At the top are words such as "reckless energy," "disrespectful enthusiasm," and "courageous loyalty."
At their worst, journalists get stuck on the middle rungs of the ladder, creating language that is neither sensory nor intelligent. Mired in the coverage of bureaucracies, they write leads such as: "A bill that would exclude tax income from the assessed value of new homes from the state education funding formula could mean a loss of revenue for county schools." Halleluiah!
Writing teachers, including yours truly, speak about the power of showing (through concrete examples) over telling. Rubbing against this grain is Francine Prose, author of "Reading Like a Writer":
The passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers -- namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell ... And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out -- don’t tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams 'yay' and jumps up and down for joy -- when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language.
One scholar who can work both ends of the ladder is Camille Paglia, as in this passage from her book "Sexual Personae":
Michelangelo’s exaltation of maleness deforms his depiction of women. Like many Renaissance artists, he used male models for female figures, since a woman posing nude was scandalous. But from the evidence of his surviving drawings, Michelangelo never sketched any woman from life, dressed or not. Furthermore, the cross-sexual origin of his female figures has left a strong visual residue. The best examples are the Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel ceiling ... The old Cumaean Sibyl is one of the most fantastic sexual personae in art. She has grim wizened features yet bursting breasts, fat as pumpkins. Her lumbering shoulder and arm are brawny beyond human maleness. She is witch, hag, wet nurse. She is Michelangelo’s Mona Lisa, mother nature in the flesh, old as time but teeming with coarse fertility.
The fabulous Ms. Paglia gives us lots of language to linger over. At the beginning and end, readers find the language of ideas, expressed by a scholar in generalities and abstractions: exaltation, evidence, visual residue, beyond human maleness, fantastic sexual personae, mother nature, old as time, coarse fertility. Such language would be intriguing enough, but flavored by specific, concrete examples -- bursting breasts, fat as pumpkins, witch, hag, wet nurse -- the passage gives off a sense of accepted authority, a feeling I like to call "gaining altitude."
Moving from sex to spirituality, I picked up an old copy of "Markings," the diary of Dag Hammarskjold, former secretary general of the United Nations. A friend of the author, English poet W.H. Auden, helped in the translation from Swedish and wrote the introduction. Auden’s language got me thinking again about the power of altitude and abstraction. Here are two examples:
- "Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do and, even if their genius is unrecognized in their lifetime, the essential earthly reward is always theirs, the certainty that their work is good and will stand the test of time."
- "It makes me very happy to see that, in the last three years of his life, he took to writing poems, for it is proof to me that he had at last acquired a serenity of mind for which he had long prayed. When a man can occupy himself with counting syllables, either he has not yet attempted any spiritual climb, or he is over the hump."
Perhaps because of his poetic vision of the world, Auden gains altitude in his prose without leaving readers thinking that meaning is beyond their grasp. By using "geniuses," rather than the idea of "genius," he turns abstraction into a narrative characterization. And by juxtaposing "serenity of mind" with "over the hump," he rides a pogo stick between the mystical and the comical.
It's not just scholars and poets who know this move. I see it often in the work of critics who work for newspapers, such as Kyle Smith, writing for the WSJ: "No contemporary literary eminence wrote as many bad books as Norman Mailer." Even better: "Vainglorious, fatuous, fractious and breathtakingly pretentious, a rake, a mystic and a fool, Mr. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway plus Dostoevski times Tolstoy. Instead he found his fame steadily eclipsed by his infamy, having stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, nearly to death...."
When I see such smart writing, it saddens me that so many scholars of journalism and media studies write so obtusely. Part of the problem, of course, is that much research in the field derives from quantitative and social science methods, creating a discourse community (in such journals as Journalism Quarterly) that working journalists and media professionals find difficult or impossible to enter. It need not be that way. Consider this paragraph written by the late Neil Postman in his book "The Disappearance of Childhood."
It is obvious that for an idea like childhood to come into being, there must be a change in the adult world. And such a change must be not only of a great magnitude but of a special nature. Specifically, it must generate a new definition of adulthood. During the Middle Ages there were several social changes, some important inventions, such as the mechanical clock, and many great events, including the Black Death. But nothing occurred that required that adults should alter their conception of adulthood itself. In the middle of the fifteenth century, however, such an event did occur: the invention of the printing press with movable type. The aim of this chapter is to show how the press created a new symbolic world that required, in its turn, a new conception of adulthood. The new adulthood, by definition, excluded children. And as children were expelled from the adult world it became necessary to find another world for them to inhabit. That other world came to be known as childhood.
What gives this paragraph altitude, I think, is that the abstractions are not so abstract, and that from the air we can still imagine a living landscape populated by folks working their presses, winding their clocks, dying from the plague. The paragraph even has a kind of narrative engine to it, a mystery about the meaning of childhood that the rest of the book will solve.
Journalists, especially those with a future, should be on the lookout for language that builds a bridge between the world of things and the world of ideas. This passage comes from Marjorie Garber, the brilliant author of "Shakespeare After All":
There has always been a productive tension between the idea of the play as a poem or a text and the idea of the play as a performance. Some portions of Shakespeare's plays are inaccessible to us because they are made up of spectacles or performances rather than words. Examples include the masque in The Tempest; the apparitions in Macbeth; the tilt, or challenge, in Pericles; the descended god Jupiter in Cymbeline; and music throughout the comedies ... Battle scenes like those in the English history plays and in Antony and Cleopatra, are also moments of high visual interest and on-stage action, important to the tenor and pace of the play, and easy to underestimate (or skip over entirely) if one reads the plays as literature rather than visualizing them as theater.
To understand the brilliance and utility of such prose, a reader need only take a taste of the bad stuff, which I will now spare the reader ... You’re welcome.
Which returns us to the future of journalism.
I'm sure I'll be the only person this week to argue that the survival of newspapers will depend upon brainy journalists spending less time and space on the who, what, when and where, and more on the why and how.
Journalists already have two practical ways for gaining altitude. The first is the nut graph, a device for linking a scene or a character to higher categories of news or meaning. Editors may not tolerate the anecdote of a young woman, her face covered with soot, in a morgue, her husband keening over the body, unless we identify that woman as a victim of an underground mine disaster, and connect her death with the idea that as women move into traditional male workplaces, they come to share with men not only the benefits but the vulnerabilities.
A distant cousin of the nut paragraph is the "conceptual scoop." In short, this comes from the ability of the journalist to sift among confusing data, information, and phenomena, see a cultural pattern and give it a name: the "soccer mom" or the "dynastic presidency." I'm about to work on an essay that will argue that journalists -- and citizens at large -- often confuse incompetence for corruption. That theory will require specific evidence, of course, but all the proofs will hang on the tree of an idea, a theory, an explanation, an analysis of American politics and culture.
The ability to think or work through abstractions connects us at the highest level to a world that can only be described by metaphysics or theology, from the debates between Plato and Aristotle over things and ideas, to Freud’s argument that the true gift of the Jews to humankind was not monotheism, but the belief in an invisible God, which inspired human beings to think more abstractly.
When some gurus of new information technologies describe the potential of the Internet, they often minimize journalists as mere content providers and data dumpers. Most of the writers and story tellers I know won’t think of themselves that way. Instead, they will find a way to report what matters, to tell stories that change lives, and, more and more I hope, help us gain a little altitude along the way.
