Human interest stories don’t interest all humans
Some readers, like this retired university professor, prefer ‘Just the facts, ma’am’
Carl Stover, like many readers, prefers the inverted pyramid style of news reporting. You know, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
“I read the Chicago Tribune and the Daily Southtown daily and cannot recall reading a story that meets your description of human interest,” Stover told me.
The 74-year-old retired professor from Governors State University has read thousands of stories in his life. He has an educated eye and a professorial grasp on the vagaries of news writing when it comes to traditional human interest stories and old-fashioned storytelling, which may be dying a slow death, he believes.
“This relates to a contemporary trope in literature and philosophy that there is no objective truth, and storytelling and lived experience are equally valid if not more valid narratives,” said Stover, a Park Forest resident who retired in 2011 after a 37-year stint at GSU. He has a point.
I’ve been guilty of using narrative storytelling to share hard-news reporting on controversial issues. In fact, this is how I’ve crafted a journalism career in an industry brimming with hard-nosed news junkies and investigative reporters.
As a reader, I prefer feature stories over news reports. As a writer, I prefer to place readers at a specific spot rather than to point toward that spot.
For example, my recent Mother’s Day column about a 101-year-old woman who cared for her special needs daughter until she had to bury her.
“On a warm Sunday afternoon Dee Zemel’s family gathered at Beth-El Cemetery in Portage to dedicate her daughter’s newly engraved headstone,” I wrote. “Surrounded by her three other children, Zemel clutched a wad of tissue, which she would need in a few seconds.”
The theme, or “nut graph,” of the column was mothers whose children may be gone but never, ever forgotten. This broader point could have been my lead. I preferred putting it at the end of my column, after I painted a portrait of the mother and her late daughter.
I honestly envy reporters who can write with brevity, a skill I do not possess. I’m in awe of writers who can say so much with so little, such as this example of the shortest yet most powerful form of narrative storytelling: “For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”
Storytelling is as universal as a teardrop and as human as the spoken word.
From Shakespeare to YouTube, people enjoy being engaged by a story using a complication-resolution scenario or one driven by intention and obstacle — classic narrative hooks. This is why I try to weave in dimensional reporting to set a scene using human senses such as sight, hearing, touch, even smell.
There’s a new push in journalism labeled as “inclusive storytelling,” which seeks to truly represent all people around the globe. It gives voice and visibility to those who have been missing or misrepresented in traditional narratives of both history and daily journalism, according to the Associated Press Stylebook.
“It helps readers and viewers both to recognize themselves in our stories, and to better understand people who differ from them in race, age, gender, class and many other ways,” the latest stylebook update reminds journalists.
Stover, whose parents were both valedictorians, cited the plethora of news stories from war-torn Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Many of those stories use narrative leads to draw in readers or viewers, such as this example Stover pointed out to me.
“Maria Shostakovich sat on her front stoop weeping. (Description of Maria’s appearance) and (description of Maria’s shot-up house). Maria was mourning the death of her grandson Josef ... she was just one of the victims of the Russian shelling of her village,” Stover wrote.
“It’s too much in my opinion,” he told me.
Stover prefers a story that would begin more like this: “Russian bombardment killed 30 people in the village of X yesterday,” he said.
Most news stories use this straight-up style of reporting and writing, if anything for lack of space. As one of my editors explained, “There’s just no way to throw on a five-paragraph narrative lede on a six-paragraph cop report.”
Stover said, “In the past 20 years or so, it goes under the rubric of Post-Modernism. In the past five years or so, it has become a serious question in politics.”
He attended middle and high school at a small private institution in England in the early 1960s, later attending the U.S. Naval Academy before transferring to Stanford University, where he took one course in expressive writing. This skill has stayed with Stover through the decades.
“Given this background, you will not be surprised that I am an educational and linguistic conservative,” he said. “Bad English grates on my nerves, and so does preciousness … and extreme relativism.”
Aristotle noted 3,000 years ago that some things are matters of opinion and others are truths. Laws and customs are different between Athens and Persia, “but fire burns here and in Persia,” Stover said.
Anyone who can quote Aristotle, “Dragnet,” postmodernism and the Ukraine War in the same email exchange is OK with me. I enjoy hearing from readers who not only read newspaper stories (and my columns), but study them for contextual connections, universal truths or grammatical errors.
Years ago another retired college professor would send me highly-detailed written critiques of my work. He enjoyed writing it. I enjoyed reading it.
Newspaper columns should be a dialogue, not a monologue. I welcome reader feedback of any kind, even if it’s to tell me that human interest stories don’t interest all humans.