Jon Franklin the other day on WriterL: The idea of a green zone and a red zone comes, of course, from Iraq. The green zone is where it's safe, and the red zone is the real world outside the barricades and the guards.
I mention this here because it seems to me that journalism has its green zones and its red zones. This is not new; history shows that journalism has a longstanding habit of covering what's easy and safe while the world goes merrily somewhere else. Thus there were hundreds of thousands of disaffected runaway children on the road for several years before Nick VonHoffmann (I hope I've spelled his name right) wrote his famous Haight-Ashbury series. After that, journalists suddenly found, to their surprise, that there was a Haight-Ashbury in their own town as well. Egads, how did those kids get there?
Today it seems to me that one of the most obvious failings of establishment journalism is its tendency to stay in the green zone. Most if not all of the coverage I see reflects the safe stuff, politics, press releases, traditional gotcha-stories and the like. Only occasionally do I see someone venture out into the red zone, as when the New York Times did a series on middle aged male dropouts. (Though, on the other hand, that was printed only after a movie, "Failure to Launch," had made the subjectsafe to talk about.)
My theory is that at least some of the animosity that many of the few remaining newspaper journalists show toward narrative is that we are walking indictments of this practice. Narrative, at least worthwhile narrative, by definition steps out of the green zone and into real life -– examining the forces, for example, that lead to the voting patterns that lead to the political horse races that everybody else covers. Narrative journalism, by definition, covers cause while traditional journalism send the newsroom mob out to cover effect.
Ed Cray came back with this: One of my complaints about narrative journalism is that so much of it pivots around rites of passage, moments of inherent drama, and so little of it deals with the everyday stuff of life, the "mundane." My guess is that the latter takes more reporting, more time, than does the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel rite-of-passage story, and time is precisely what few newsrooms can spare.
So it is that narrative journalism too rarely enters the red zone.
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Thoughts, Gangreyers?
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