Mike Miller is Page One Editor of the Wall Street Journal where he has worked for nearly 18 years as a reporter and editor.
Q: Why did the story “How Five Lives Became One Horror” include a “Note on Sources”?
A: This story was an example of a question we confront a lot, especially in front page stories in the Journal.
There are great storytellers in the Journal — it’s part of our tradition — who are just superbly gifted at compelling narrative techniques. Bryan Gruley, the lead writer on this story, is one of the very best, just a spellbinding storyteller.
At the same time, our intense ethic and tradition here is to tell readers where information comes from, and keep the faith with readers that we have everything completely nailed.
Sometimes there’s tension between those two impulses when you have a beautiful read that you don’t want to fill with speed bumps attributing everything. And yet at the same time we have this responsibility and passionate belief that we do tell readers where our information, the nonintuitive information, comes from.
As a reader, I want to know where stuff comes from, even if it’s in a source I really trust. I just want to know, ‘How’d you get that?” You get such a great feeling of credibility and authority when you’re reading a book or a newspaper story where you see where everything came from. I’m the kind of reader that reads footnotes in non-fiction books and I love books that tell you every step of the way. It’s not that I don’t trust the great writers that don’t footnote but it’s like sleeping on a really comfortable mattress when you have the reporter’s trail in front of you to follow.
In previous cases here at the Journal, we go with the speed bumps and the truth is that that really works just about all the time; the speed bumps aren’t all that bumpy and the benefit that you get from establishing that credibility with the reader way outweighs whatever benefit you get from a smooth narrative read.
As Page One editor here — and I know I speak for Paul Steiger, the managing editor, and his deputies who are my bosses — we all always want to answer the questions, ‘Where does this come from?” Usually you can do it gracefully. Sometimes you just say, “he recalls.” It’s usually a lot easier than you think. You say, “Joe later read.” Graceful little dependent clauses. Then from time to time you have these kind of boilerplate statements like the one on top of this story that said this comes from interviews with a whole lot of people.
When this story came in it was really one of the very best narrative reads I have ever encountered. It was 150 inches long. But it just read like a freight train. I read it and thought, ‘God, I want to know more about all these people.’ Then I counted how long it was and I saw that it was one of the longest stories we’ve ever run. It just didn’t feel that long. Bryan and his colleagues did this incredible job but the narrative was so extraordinary that I was a little worried about the speed bumps; you had this amazing suspense of who was going to live and who was going to die that the speed bumps would have ruined.
If we had said in the lead anecdote that this note posted by the banquet chief for Moises Rivas came from the chef’s daybook where he had a copy of the note that he later gave us, that’s a tip-off that Moises is not going to make it, and we didn’t get that from him and it would have completely spoiled the excruciating suspense of the story. We realized that we could keep our compact with the reader and tell them where everything came from but tell them in a different place and have our cake and eat it too. So I combed through the story and asked what would I as a reader want to know where it came from. There were a couple of dozen things, especially the reporting from inside the World Trade Center where we clearly were not there. That was the lion’s share of what we wound up attributing
Pretty soon the story goes into following the aftermath of the survivors and, as a reader, I wasn’t asking myself where did this come from. You just knew the reporter was there at the funeral and there at Anita’s house. Inside the World Trade cCenter you needed to know. To me the italic intro statement was good but I just didn’t want anybody to have any doubts. I wanted people to know that we had world class sourcing for everything in the story and we were not playing games or cutting corners here.
Q: When and how did you come up with the idea?
A: We sort of cooked this up in the last couple of days. Tuesday night I was in (managing editor) Paul Steiger’s provisional South Brunswick, N.J. office with Dan Hertzberg and Barney Calame, two of his deputy MEs, and we were brainstorming about what we were going to do about this. We all quickly agreed, let’s have that blanket statement — “comes from interviews with more than 125 sources” — then somewhere in the conversation cooked up identifying sources at the end.
Q: Has the Journal ever included a note on sources at the end of a story before?
A: None of us can aremember seeing it, but one of our other journalism rules is you never say it’s the first-ever because someone will find one somewhere some other time. Of course, it borrows in its form from nonfiction book writing but we couldn’t remember seeing it in another newspaper, although it wouldn’t surprise me if someone else tried it because it seemed to solve the problem so neatly.
Q: Do you anticipate “Notes on Sources” will be a regular feature?
A: I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of these in the Journal because in the preponderance of cases the conventional attribution works wonderfully well.
Q: Will it be the beginning of a trend elsewhere?
A: It’s going to be interesting to see what readers and colleagues make of it. I think it’s an elegant solution to a very widespread problem. Narrative journalism is so commonplace now and yet it raises this difficult quandary which is how do you do it and still hew to your tradition of telling readers where you’re getting your stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it popping up here and there but for us it’s a special tactic we’re going keep on a very high shelf for very extraordinary circumstances. Again because the traditional way of doing it 99 times out of 100 works totally well.
Q: Do you see it limited to reconstructions?
A: Probably, because otherwise if you’re on the scene you don’t need a note like this. If it’s not a narrative story, which is another way of saying reconstruction, the usual attribution works well.
Q: What conditions do you think demand it?
A: The usual rule of thumb here is that if you weren’t there you’ve got to attribute it. Our grammar is, we were there unless we tell you. There are exceptions but that’s the good working rule here.
If you ask me when would I use it again, there would have to be the same extraordinary circumstances that we had here. Number one, a writing job that is so awesome that the usual speed bumps might do damage.
This story didn’t even have the famous Journal graf. This is the story of five people…it just started and went. It was pure narrative. There was no statement of larger theme, it just didn’t need it. It was a brilliant idea not to have one.
The nut graf is one of those bedrock rules that you have to really be great to break, just like you have to be Picasso to depart from realism. It really helps focus stories wonderfully well. I’m a big believer. Once in a while a story comes down the pike that doesn’t need one because it’s written so well. You don’t need that structural element to help you make sense of the story; its just a freight train rolling along and you’re helplessly in its thrall. That was the case here.
I would do it again with something that relied heavily on reconstruction that would raise questions for the reader, like how do you know what went on the burning trade center? The reader doesn’t ask, how do you know what happened at Shea Stadium last night? at City Hall? Again we do lots of reconstructions where the usual attribution works totally fine: “He later recalled.” “According to his friend.”
Condition three is where there is an element of suspense that the attribution risks spoiling. Frankly that turns out to be who lives, who dies. Otherwise the attribution doesn’t spoil everything.
Q: Did the reporters have to do anything extra or unusual to be able to provide material for the note?
A: The good news was they did not. There were five ace reporters who had everything in their notes and they knew that was how they were going to get edited, that they had to have everything dead to rights. Yesterday I was able to e-mail them and say we need sourcing for this, this and this. They just opened up their notebooks and shot it back.
Q: Who wrote the note?
A: It was a real e-mail chain. I think what I did was ask Bryan (Gruley) who was the lead writer to make the first pass at combing through and come up with an attribution for everything that was non-intitutive, that he thought a reader would have a question of, and he mobilized the other four writers and came up with a draft. The draft came in organized by character which was a useful way to do it. I edited it and added a bunch more things I wanted in it.
Q: What is a non-intuitive element?
A: It’s a judgment call obviously. I just used my own self as a sample reader and wondered what would I would wonder about the sourcing. There’s a long scene at a funeral and I didn’t wonder about that at all; we were clearly there. There are lots of long scenes in people’s apartments a week later. There were a couple of places I asked, ‘Were we in the room here?’ And when the answer was yes, we don’t need to attribute that there then. That was a reasonable rule of thumb for me. If we were there, I didn’t want to clutter up the notes box. I think that’s the default assumption.
Q: In a sense, it’s a gesture. Is it just one in a number of gestures that a newspaper can make towards its readers?
A: Yes. You couldn’t function as a newspaper if you had to attribute literally everything: “According to my eyewitness report of the double-play at Shea Stadium…” This is on a spectrum that we deal with every day. It’s always a matter of judgement — what do we have to tell readers and what can we assume they’re comfortable with? There’s always this tension between wanting to maximize the amount of information about sourcing that we give our readers and also create something readable. That’s a balancing act every day.
Q: What’s been the reaction in the newsroom?
A: Paul Steiger at our morning news meeting asked around what people thought. The truth is that everyone was so blown away by the story that that’s all anyone was talking about. There was no controversy. He sort of opened up the floor and invited any critquing of it and there wasn’t any at the moment.
Q: Would you advocate this approach for other newspapers?
A: Again, for those extraordinary circumstances — for the .1 percent of stories — sure, I would. I would advocate it especially for those for newspapers that do less than this. I would be hard-pressed to counsel a paper that already had beautiful attribution in the story to take the attribution out and put it in a footnote because I believe more is better. I think if you had a narrative story that left all these questions open and anyone was asking me for advice, I would say, number one, try attributing in the story because it’s probably much less intrusive than you fear. Number two, try this other approach that we tried on Oct. 11.
Q: Was the editor’s note extraordinary for the Journal?
A: It was unusual for us to put it in front of the story. Usually we will weave that sentiment into the body of the story. Which we do all the time in our nutgraf but we had no nut graf or pause in the story where it was natural to do that. John Blanton, who is the editor on my Page One team who worked on this story and who is a brilliant editor, said ‘let’s put it in front of the story.’ It was certainly more prominent than weaving into into the story so it added, not subtracted, to the conveying of trust to the reader and then it let the story roll along on its freight train track.
Q: Editors, including some who judge the Pulitzers and ASNE Prizes, have criticized reconstructions, arguing that they give no sign how the writer knows these things that are presented as fact, and this concern may have influenced the selection of prize winners in the last couple of years. Do you have any sense of that?
A: No. I know it bothers me and I know it bothers Paul Steiger, the managing editor here, and others… Dan Hertzberg and Barney Calame; we talk about that a lot. I don’t know about the broader controversy…There were no politics about it here because it’s something we all feel strongly about and we are pretty hawkish about…We earn our readers’ trust every day and the reason the readers trust us is because we’re straight with them about matters like this.
