The Dominance of Anglo-Saxon Journalism
By Alessia Cerantola
I have a moment of panic before sitting down to write in English. That’s because I was trained in Italy, where the style of news writing is far looser than in most English-language publications.
Italian stories often take readers on a winding journey before getting to the main point. When I first started working as an international journalist, though, I realized that this isn’t the norm. Instead, the field is dominated by the conventions of what we non-native-English-speakers call “Anglo-Saxon journalism.” I had to learn them from scratch.
English-language news stories almost always follow a general pattern: a lede that introduces the story, followed soon after by a paragraph or two called a “nut graf,” which sums up the story quickly and concisely. This introduction is crucial in determining whether the reader is hooked, or will abandon the story.
Italian journalists tend to have a more casual approach to this so-called “inverted pyramid,” where facts descend in importance as the story progresses. The writing may be a bit complicated, and sometimes the journalists add their own opinion. In English, the style is much more straightforward; the neutral language of “objectivity” is the writer’s North star.
The “Anglo-Saxon” style has been enormously influential on journalism worldwide, but other countries still have their own traditions of writing, which often differ a great deal from the Anglo-Saxon norm.
I first started to notice these different styles when I worked at Internazionale, an Italian magazine that translates global media stories into Italian and edits them for a local audience. I was in charge of translating articles from Japanese to Italian.
One major difference is that the Japanese language does not convey plurals the same way as Italian or English, pronouns are also often unisex. If a story doesn’t include specific language identifying quantity or gender, there is no way for the reader to know. This adds a layer of ambiguity, and made it complicated for me to deliver a precise translation into Italian.
Another norm in Japanese journalism is to completely omit attribution and sourcing in order to avoid exposing individuals to public scrutiny, which is seen differently in Japan compared to the more individualistic U.S. and Western Europe. For example, reporters in Japan may refer to a fact or claim without citing a source.
“People generally tend to hide behind anonymity, and journalism is affected by that habit,” said Yasuomi Sawa, professor of journalism at Senshu University in Tokyo.
Because of these differences, writing in English as a second language is almost akin to being a chameleon or adopting a second persona, Sawa told me.
“It is something like being a ninja,” he said. When writing in English, “I have to begin with speaking English and thinking in English.”
When editing a story from French, Mark Lee Hunter, journalist and professor at INSEAD Social Innovation Centre in Paris, also notices several differences.
In traditional English-language journalism, the pursuit of objectivity reigns supreme, and this means keeping the reporter out of the narrative. But in French, this isn’t the case. “One of the things that my French colleagues were always saying to me was, ‘How come you’re not more present in the story?’” Hunter said.
Russian journalists also have their own particular style, says Ilya Lozovsky, a senior editor at OCCRP, who was born in Russia and speaks the language, but grew up in the U.S.
“I find that Russian stories often have more elaborate narratives, in which the main findings sometimes are not given at the top of the story, but ‘revealed’ lower down — almost as a surprise,” said Lozovsky.
“But I do think there is value in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ journalistic tradition of having a tight nut graf at the top of the story,” Lozovsky added. “It enables readers who don’t have the time or willingness to read the whole thing to still get the point.”
What is the difference?
When I started writing in English for U.K. and U.S. media, I also noticed another difference. The editing process is often much more thorough, to the point that it can feel invasive to those who do not come from the Anglo-Saxon tradition of editing.
My English-language editors seemed obsessed with paring down my writing and asking me what my sentences meant. They would frequently reorganize and shorten my stories to “get to the point,” as they put it.
After three years as a staff reporter at OCCRP, where editors tailored my articles for an English-speaking audience, I finally had the chance to see the process from the inside when I joined OCCRP’s editorial team as a coordinating editor. I felt like I was inside an artisan’s workshop.
There are multiple stages of editing, which all aim to make the story clearer. The story is taken apart, re-shaped, polished, all to appeal to a customer: the reader. The product is discussed with the reporters in a dynamic and sometimes tense process, but the ultimate goal is to obtain the best and clearest result, the final work of art.
Articles come to the OCCRP editorial team from reporters of every country and journalistic culture, which can make the editing process tricky. One day an editor might be working on a terse, tight story from Serbia, and the next day the text could come from Venezuela and be long and full of detail. Their goal is to make all the stories comprehensible to English-speaking readers, as well as engaging and true-to-life. It’s not always easy.
“I try as hard as I can to keep a flavor of the original draft, but that doesn’t always mean translating the story word for word,” said Caroline Henshaw, OCCRP’s environment editor, who edits stories from across the world and has worked as a French-to-English editor in the past.
In French reportage, “a lot of what would be seen as the news is often very different; on the other hand, you can do things when you write in French that you just can’t in English — for color it is a much more expressive language,” she said.
Nathan Jaccard, OCCRP’s Latin America editor, whose job it is to help local reporters across Central and South America investigate stories and write them in English, said most journalists in the region are used to writing very human-centered stories full of color and lively scenes.
“In Latin America, our tradition [of reportage] has elements of features,” he said. “These parts are the ones that, in general, are cut in the editing process.”
In the end, OCCRP stories usually end up reading fairly similar to other English-language publications, since they are edited by native English speakers who learned their craft in English-speaking newsrooms. But is that what journalists around the world should aim for? Some aren’t so sure.
As a young journalist in Italy, I became obsessed with learning how to write in an “Anglo-Saxon” way. I used to carefully select long-form articles from major U.K. and U.S. publications and would read them again and again, almost meditatively, until I absorbed their rhythm. I analyzed and annotated the structure of each piece and no matter what the topic was — the description of a financial crime or the aftermath of a hurricane — I tried to apply that pace and structure to my own writing.
But over the years, I have noticed that while the Anglo-Saxon structure still dominates journalism globally, cracks and changes have begun to appear. Journalists from around the world are trying to negotiate a space for their own work, drawing on the English style but also trying to preserve their uniqueness.
Giovanni de Mauro, the editor in chief of Internazionale, the Italian news magazine where I cut my teeth, said he admired a great deal of English-language journalism, but also found it to be predictable and, sometimes, uninspiring.
“You see these articles that have a structure that is always the same…It is extremely brilliant, the writing by certain journalists is outstanding stuff and rightly deserves Pulitzers, [but] it’s predictable in its formatting and so you could almost desk-write some of these pieces.”
Anuška Delić, editor in chief of Oštro, OCCRP’s member center based in Ljubljana says that there is no particular style for stories written in Slovenia. Her team is using OCCRP stories for inspiration but they also want to branch out from this style.
“I want to have a nice story but I want to tell it with calmer discourse, with less thrill, in a kind of collected, and understandable, and sometimes maybe a little bit ironic way,” Delić said. “OCCRP’s discourse is very much Yankee discourse. It’s a little too Hollywoodish for me.”
But the cultural contentions are not specific to one newsroom or OCCRP.
The spread of “Western” journalism is a kind of “imperialist” phenomenon, said Saba Bebawi, head of journalism and writing at the University of Technology, Sydney.
“Those kinds of traditions of reporting that have been universal and standardized have come from mainly American or British newsrooms.”
“It sounds rather elitist to me that you write in a particular way and you structure in a very Anglo-Saxon style,” says Bebawi.
She says Western journalism should start adapting to the rest of the world — instead of the other way around — in order to reach a global audience.
“I think new organizations in the Western world, or the Anglo-American or Anglo traditions, would need to rethink what their style means,” says Bebawi.
For me, the tensions are conflicting. The “Anglo” model is not just a style; it also provides a minimum guarantee of readability and clarity. But is something lost when local conventions are elided in favor of a one-size-fits-all international style?
There is no recipe for a new hybrid form. But as journalists globally continue to experiment and come up against tensions of “Anglo” form and structure, perhaps new ways of collaboration and innovation will emerge.
In the meantime, I will keep panicking when writing any article in English, prepared for the onslaught of questions from editors and the inevitable addition of a “nut graf.”
Alessia Cerantola is a coordinating editor at OCCRP. This piece was edited by two editors, who asked her dozens of additional questions, changed the order of the paragraphs, and changed the sentences for more clarity.
