Resonant storytelling: Slowing down the blur of the media landscape
Note: This post is another in a series exploring the future of journalism and media education for my 2018 #disruptive fellowship from the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY.
This summer, I met up with some high-school buddies as another of the gang turned 50. We reminisced about the old days, about the hair bands of the ’80s, about vinyl records and turntables.
We returned to those indelible moments when we would sit and actually listen to music.
Back then, it wasn’t background noise. Listening was an active process. You’d carefully select an album from your carefully curated collection — after all, you were spending a chunk of money to buy your vinyl — and you’d carefully remove the disc from its dust sleeve before placing it carefully on the turntable. (If you were a true audiophile, you’d also carefully clean it with a dust cleaner to extend the album’s purity.) You’d stare at the album cover, read the liner notes, and concentrate on the music itself.
It’s been years since I’ve done that. Most of the time, I devote my scant media-listening time to podcasts, and if I am in a musical frame of mind, I throw on a random Spotify list to match my current mood. But in the past couple of months, I’ve returned to the active-listening habit, choosing bands and songs deliberately. I’ve started donning headphones again to focus solely on the listening experience. And more time in the car is spent on hand-selected music rather than accidental DJ chatter.
I see others embracing this active-listening approach. At the birthday party, one of my friends noted he had unearthed all of his old albums, bought a turntable, and started listening to his records again. A colleague I know at Drury has been doing this for a while now, too. He will often post the album side he’s playing on Instagram, and inevitably, the choice conjures memories of my own music experience.
It’s not news that vinyl records have experienced a rebirth. Sales grew to $388.5 million in 2017, up from $355.4 million the previous year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Across the country, people are rediscovering the power of albums.
The goal of this nostalgia trip isn’t to bemoan the rise of digital media and declare the moral superiority of analog vinyl (although you should run right out and buy a turntable to save your musical soul). In this reclaiming of old media habits — which some of my 20-something students have adopted — I see a craving to slow down our frenetic media landscape and return to our reflective roots as human beings.
Each day, the social-media machine gun sprays us with selfies, status updates, headlines, video snippets, and sound clips culled from our friends, families, colleagues, and favorite brands. We are inundated by —and participating in — a ceaseless stream of everything from everywhere about every moment. We are living in the next iteration of future shock.
Amid the explosion of electronic stimulation, people are seeking a return to ways that feel more in touch with our collective humanity: The rise of farmers markets and microbreweries. Minimalism and tiny homes. Travels into the heart of their landscapes.
That desire has also manifested itself in media usage. As journalists and journalism educators, we must find ways to incorporate this mindful ethic into an arena that currently cherishes immediacy and effervescent multimedia. Yes, we must experiment with new forms of media technology (e.g. drone video, virtual-reality experiences, interactive chats), but we should also appreciate this quest for the complex thought, the deep engagement, the connection to our inner selves.
With the rise in technology has come a concurrent burst of interest in tradition. Print book sales have risen every year since 2013, according to Publishers Weekly. National Geographic remains a strong brand with a total reach of more than 30 million for its magazine journalism. And even smaller brands are finding some success in the slowing down.
Slow journalism
I recently subscribed to Delayed Gratification, an unusual print quarterly from the UK that revisits the previous quarter’s news and prides itself on “slow journalism.” In other words, the June 2018 edition tries to make sense of what happened during the January through March period, with the benefit of hindsight and reflection.
When my latest magazine arrived, I tweeted joyfully.
Of course, as is Twitter’s wont, the naysayers responded within minutes.
But the magazine has survived since 2011. It’s printed on high-quality paper stock, and it’s been developed with loving attention paid to detail and design. And most important, it has found a community of believers.
Beyond the print product, it incorporates other aspects of community-building for its journalism. Besides the magazine, it uses an email newsletter to connect with its audience, and it provides in-person events and classes to introduce its journalists as people with insight and humanity.
Email has re-emerged as a popular method of connecting with audiences through customized newsletters that help us sort through the informational clutter clogging our brains.
And news events have been embraced across the spectrum by many news organizations including the Washington Post, WNYC, and Recode as a way to connect with communities on a more personal level. The Texas Tribune, which has grown a community-minded mission and donation-funded core into a vibrant news organization with multiple consistent revenue streams, has become among the most successful with such events, as its annual Texas Tribune Festival (#TribFest) now draws thousands of people to its multiple stages. In its 2016 IRS filing, the organization reported that events brought in more than $400,000 in revenue.
The rise of podcasting
In this mix of slow journalism, I am most drawn to podcasting, which requires a commitment of time and mental energy on the part of storyteller and listener.
The New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast — which has used the tagline “this moment deserves to be understood” — has emerged as a top download with more than 5 million unique listeners because allows us to explore a topic deeply for 20 to 30 minutes with journalists who have dedicated much time and effort to deciphering the complexity of our world. We hear the journalists as human beings, not as faceless portals of information, and we experience the voices of those affected by the news in their everyday lives. It is an immersive, exploratory experience that often evokes strong emotions as well. Few forms of media are as intimate as audio, whether it comes through the radio in your car or your earbuds while on the treadmill.
Like choosing an album from your collection, the medium requires an active commitment: ordering, downloading/streaming, listening. And in recent years, podcasting has finally taken hold as a valuable delivery option as more of us become enraptured by audio documentaries and immersive empathetic experiences like NPR’s excellent Invisibilia podcast.
Netflix recognized this desire for immersion early in its streaming life as it bet millions on original programming. When “House of Cards” was released in its entirety in 2013, some pundits scoffed at the presentational shift, but Netflix had astutely identified our binge gene from the old shows on its platform and the popularity of DVD box sets. We crave the ability to explore these complex worlds and the characters who inhabit them. We want themes and feelings to linger well after the media experience has ended.
Nonfiction podcasts have latched onto Netflix’s binge-watching notion and hook us with well-defined characters and plots. Much like the Netflix documentaries “Making a Murderer” and “The Keepers,” the best podcasts take us deeply into a topic to explore the nuance behind the headlines.
The latest season of the “30 For 30” podcast, an excellent extension of ESPN’s documentary brand, offers an impressive example of this revisiting of the news. The sexual-harassment claims surrounding popular yoga master Bikram Choudhury have been well reported in recent years, but this exploration — which reporter Julia Lowry Henderson spent months investigating — takes us to a different realm, a place where we feel the voices of victims, and the human struggle behind their words.
The experience represents the realization of what some have dubbed the “journalism of empathy,” a concept rooted in the days of narrative nonfiction and civic journalism. How do we listen to and engage our communities so we can tell all of our stories more meaningfully?
Jennifer Brandel, the founder of Hearken, has developed a model of listening that’s at work in news organizations around the globe. In a recent Medium post, she summarized the missteps of journalistic engagement well:
Too often, when it comes to engaging communities, we act like askholes. We ask for their story, we extract their experiences and concerns, and then we package and polish them up to share with audiences for our own financial gain. We don’t follow up. We don’t thank them. We don’t ask what they need. We just ask for what we need from them.
In an age where media credibility and trust continue to decline, we need to find ways to engage our communities deeply and meaningfully.
The road ahead
The way forward in journalism has many paths. Some have embraced search-engine optimization and clickbait, chasing Google trends to entice and captivate the immediate audience. Others have embraced the creative storytelling of the social platforms, with chatbots, Snapchat stories, and Facebook Live/Periscope shots in the moment. For others, it’s about data, virtual reality, or gaming.
But there is room, too, for a slow, compassionate form of journalism driven by reflection and empathy, a journalism that is gradually finding its way into newsrooms and j-school curricula. Our challenge is balancing the necessity of new technologies with the sense of humanity that speaks our story to all of us.
Recently, I felt this human connection via story most keenly through a decidedly nonjournalistic take on our lives: Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette.” I won’t spoil the entire performance for the uninitiated, but suffice it to say, it is unlike any “standup” I’ve experienced.
I use “experienced” deliberately; for that one hour and nine minutes, I became inextricably immersed in her story, her insights, her intricate humanity.
The ending monologue is so sharp, so soul-baringly touching that the mere thought of it inspires tears even now, days after I sat mesmerized by her performance. One segment in particular speaks to our inner desire for human connection through story:
I believe we could paint a better world if we learned how to see it from all perspectives, as many perspectives as we possibly could. Because diversity is strength. Difference is a teacher. Fear difference, you learn nothing. …
I just needed my story heard, my story felt and understood, by individuals with minds of their own. Because, like it or not, your story is my story. And my story is your story.
Throughout my almost 50 years of life, I’ve experienced this magical connection between storyteller and story hearer in a variety of nonfiction.
Joan Didion understood it in 1967 as she delved into San Francisco’s hippie scene in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” She recognized the hollowness of previous coverage with journalists oversimplifying “the hippie phenomenon” as
…an extended panty raid; an artistic avant-garde led by such YMHA regulars as Allen Ginsberg; or a thoughtful protest not unlike joining the Peace Corps, against the culture which had produced Saran-Wrap and the Vietnam War. This last, or they’re-trying-to-tell-us-something approach, reached its apogee in a Time cover story which revealed that hippies “scorn money — they call it ‘bread’ ” and remains the most remarkable, if unwitting, extant evidence that the signals between the generations are irrevocably jammed.
Our signals may indeed be jammed, but, let us hope, not irrevocably.
More than a decade ago, NPR offered a breathtaking essay from Ben Mattlin to help those of us without wheelchairs understand the perspective of a wheeled life.
Six years ago, it was Special Olympian John Franklin Stephens who eloquently explained to a callous Ann Coulter why the “R-word” was so offensive.
Last year, it was Stephanie McCrummen who led us on a multi-layered exploration of a Muslim doctor and his rural Minnesota community.
This past summer, it was Jessica Contrera’s deeper take for us to understand the struggles and fears of a Washington, D.C., neighborhood after a 10-year-old had been killed in a senseless shooting.
The best storytellers have rediscovered the importance of engaging a diverse community on a human level, of finding their stories in others’ stories, of sharing in a way that ignites empathy through experience, complexity through detail, depth through patience. It reaches well beyond the immediate collection and recitation of facts toward the much harder work of understanding.
As I think about resonant storytelling and work with my Drury colleagues to recreate our journalism curriculum, it is here I begin.
