Buy It

Ira Glass in his introduction to the new anthology The New Kings of Nonfiction: I don't see anything wrong with a piece of reporting turning into a fable. In fact, when I'm researching a story and the real-life situation starts to turn into allegory ... I feel incredibly lucky, and do everything in my power to expand that part of the story. Everything suddenly stands for something so much bigger, everything has more resonance, everything's more engaging. Turning your back on that is rejecting tools that could make your work more powerful. But for a surprising number of reporters, the stagecraft of telling a story -- managing its fable-like qualities -- is not just of secondary concern, but a kind of mumbo jumbo that serious-minded people don't get too caught up in. Taking delight in this part of the job, from their perspective, has little place in our important work as journalists. Another public radio officemate at that time -- a Columbia University School of Journalism grad -- would come back from the field with funny, vivid anecdotes she'd tell us in the hallway. Few of them ever appeared in her reports, which were dry as bones and hard to listen to.

She always had the same explanation for why she'd omit the entertaining details: "I thought that would be putting myself in the story." As if being interesting and expressing any trace of a human personality would somewhow detract from the nonstop flow of facts she assumed her listeners were craving. There's a whole class of reporters -- especially ones who went to journalism school, by the way -- who have a strange kind of religious conviction about this. They actually get indignant; it's an affront to them when a reporter tries to amuse himself and his audience.

I say phooey to that. This book says phooey to that.