We asked Poynter faculty members and Poynter Online contributors for
their impressions of the news of the week. What surprised them? What
was overplayed? Underplayed? What does it mean for the media? What will
they be watching for next week? At the end of every week, we’ll ask the
same questions and you can find their answers here.
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For the week of Jan. 23-27, 2006:
- Roy Peter Clark on “Oprah,” Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” of truth
- Rick Edmonds on the problems that plague Knight Ridder
- Steve Outing on Dan Gillmor and Google
- David Shedden on Black History Month
- Meg Martin on Anne Hull, James Frey and Samuel Alito
James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” of Truth
Roy Peter Clark
Vice President and Senior Scholar
Roy Peter Clark appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” Thursday, Jan.
26, along with author James Frey and several journalists. During the
show, Roy emphasized the importance of transparency and truthfulness in
memoir. Here’s what he said:
I think there needs to be — most importantly — truth in
advertising. When James writes, “Remember the truth — it’s all that
matters,” that’s such a powerful statement in addiction, in recovery,
in journalism, in race relations and personal relations … I think the
important thing that you’re doing today is taking the pendulum that
says memoirs are truthful, except for the parts that are lies … and
you’re challenging publishers to label what’s going on in the book.I think that there should be a statement of method in the beginning
of every memoir that describes the degree of accuracy and practical
truth and the degree of fiction …Oprah, this is very important for two reasons: the first is that
when you learn some significant piece of a story is not true, you begin
to doubt everything in the story, and when you learn that a memoir
turns out to be so fictionalized, you begin to doubt every memoir …There are people in this world, including heads of state, that are
standing up and declaring that the Holocaust never happened. We need to
believe in verifiable truth, and that has to be represented in
publishing, as well as journalism.
Here are some of Roy’s reflections on the show and the issues it provokes for journalists. Listen to Roy Peter Clark talk about his appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
Poynter Online Manager Editor Julie Moos: Roy, how did it come to be that you appeared on “Oprah” today (Jan. 26)?
Roy:
It was very surprising. About a week ago, I was sitting, I have to say,
in a Poynter meeting — a little bored — and I wound up writing about a 400-word satirical essay about creating a grading system for memoirs.
The grading system would be, instead of … for mature audiences: it
would say “B.S.,” standing for “Beyond Common Sense,” and the
descriptions would be things like, “Everything in this book is true,
except the parts that are not true.”
Through the help of Dean Baquet, it wound up in the Los Angeles Times.
It was really part of a mountain of strong critical commentary about
the book, about the publishing company that published it, about the
lack of standards for memoir and about Oprah’s quick defense of the
book and her declaration that there is some kind of difference between
— let’s call it “actual truth” and “emotional truth.” And she clearly
came to regret it, and today she did something that I thought was quite
amazing and admirable.
Julie: So did somebody on Oprah’s show read your article in the L.A. Times?
Roy:
I have a feeling they may read everything that has Oprah’s name in it
— but yes, a producer called me, and she interviewed me at length and
asked if I would be willing to come on a moment’s notice. I said yes,
probably so, and then they invited me, and they dis-invited me, and
they re-invited me.
Julie: Why did they dis-invite you?
Roy:
I don’t know, but I thought maybe … there was the risk that the show
was getting too cluttered with opinion. But they re-invited me because
they thought that even though I’d written satire — that, unlike the
other commentaries, that I had an idea — several ideas — about what
should be done to reform the way memoirs are considered and published.
Julie: James Frey has never been a
journalist as far as I know, and his book is not considered journalism,
so what is the journalistic interest in this controversy and in memoirs
being maybe misinterpreted or misunderstood?
Roy:
Well, I think that in journalism, in the last two or three years, every
time there’s been a major scandal — and there’s been several of them
— there’s been a stepping back and a sort of reconsideration of
standards and practices.
And the word that has been drummed into our
consciousness is “transparency.” We seem to want to know as a culture,
more and more, about how evidence is gathered, how news decisions are
made. And there’s this tremendous disconnect, and you
could feel it in the audience today. The audience gave James Frey a
standing ovation when he came in, but by the time he was answering
Oprah’s questions about some of the made-up or exaggerated details, you
could literally hear these women … give a collective groan of
disappointment and disillusionment.
The general public thinks that the details and
elements in memoirs are real. There are academic debates, there are
publishing debates, there’s a spectrum of opinion that defines memoir
from, I would say, what we would call autobiography with journalistic
standards, from fiction laced with some facts drawn from real life.
What I come out of
this experience with is, number one: the importance of Oprah’s voice.
Number two: the exemplary way in which she assumed responsibility for a
misjudgment, a miscalculation. Three: I thought her amazing … Oprah
has this sort of “celebrity personality” and she has this “journalism
personality.” And I thought it was one of the most grueling interviews
of a friendly subject — a subject that she was friendly to at one time
— that I’ve ever seen. Now I think the next thing to do — something
Poynter could do — is a summit conference: a gathering of wise men and
women to see if we could better articulate what standards we expect for
memoir.
Let me put it this way: I’m not sure this particular
story — in the long run — the fact that it was faked or not, has any
real significance; it’s relatively petty. But it represents a kind of
— almost the ultimate disillusion of traditional notions of truth,
objectivity.
We’ve spent about
a generation now, chipping away at objectivity, and maybe rightly so,
but the pendulum has swung so far that there’s so much cynicism in
America about anybody’s ability to render the truth on the government
level, in journalism, and so I think what opened it today allows us all
to say, more strongly, more fervently, with passion: enough is enough.
Let’s restore and redeem some enduring values that have been lost as we
drifted more and more towards subjectivity, and “as long as I say it’s
my story, it is.”
Julie: Is there anything you wish you had been able to say to Oprah and her viewers that you didn’t have the opportunity to say?
Roy:
I didn’t know I was going to be on the show until the day before, but I
brought with me lots of things to read. I wrote down a lot of ideas,
and surprisingly, I thought they were all represented — either in the
show, or what they call the after-show [“Oprah, After the Show”]; and
if not by me, they were represented by the two other journalists on the
panel, [Frank Rich and Richard Cohen], who are very important and, I
think, influential figures and have very strong points of view.
I
guess, what I would say — you know, this is a popular television show.
I didn’t want to give a lecture on genre definitions, and sub-genres.
But, I think that there is a lot of work to be done on redefining the
memoir; maybe making some distinctions between different kinds of
memoirs, and then creating some apparatus that either demonstrates the
accuracy and truthfulness of the account, or that declares methods that
are more fictional in their basis. Things like: “Does the writer use
any composite characters or not?” “Did the writer invent anything?”
“Does the writer really have a dog?” There’s one memoirist who wrote a
dog into a memoir, [a dog] that she didn’t have. I don’t understand
that. She at least could have bought the dog first… “Are you faithful to time — or do you take three meals with a key character and compress it into one?”
With
new technologies, with Web sites, you could footnote the memoir. I
mean, you could basically give chapter explanations of where this
information came from. If you had a root canal without any painkillers
— Novocaine — and you have a medical record to that effect, you
wouldn’t put it in the text of the memoir because that would muck it
up. But, why not make that available so that you can really create the
sense that this is true?
The one thing that offended me, I would
say, by what Frey did, as opposed to other memoirists, is Frey declared
— in the book — a level of truthfulness and of candor and of honesty
and of no B.S. that is very much associated to behaviors that are part
of recovery from addiction. If you go to an AA meeting with that book,
and tell the people in one of those meetings all the fake things that
are in it, they are going to call you onto the carpet. So in a way,
it’s a betrayal of the very culture he’s attempting to honor and
celebrate.
Julie: OK, I have one last question. As you’re
describing footnoting, it reminds me of strategies that journalists use
with narrative: to be very transparent about how they got the
information — “I was with them as they crossed the finish line”; “I
spoke with this person and this person and this person” — is that the
kind of strategy you’re suggesting might be worth considering for
memoirs?
Roy: Absolutely. I’ll give you an example. When
I have written about my grandmother — how my Jewish grandmother
married my Italian grandfather — back, I think, in 1917, I believe. It
wasn’t unheard of, but it was a very rare thing, and it defined my
family for generations to come.
There are no photographs of
that. But I went back, and I got whatever I could find. And so, what I
did find was the marriage certificate. The marriage license, I believe,
and the marriage certificate had the names of all the characters who
were present. Then I could use those names to say to my mother, “Hey,
did you know so-and-so, did you know Nick D’Abrizio?” And she said,
“Oh, well let me tell you about him.”
So, I’m not sure
whether I would mention the wedding license, but why not? Not
necessarily in the text, but in some sort of documentation. Especially
if you could do it online, where you have an ocean of space.
Julie:
Thank you very much — that was Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar and
vice president of the Poynter Institute. Thank you for listening.
Smoke Signals at Knight Ridder
By Rick Edmonds
Researcher and writer
Knight Ridder’s conferences with potential buyers are theoretically hush-hush, off the record. However, reporters for the San Jose Mercury News and The Wall Street Journal have done a nice job noting who goes in and out and ferreting out what some of the conversation is about.
This
week’s main news was that Knight Ridder has been laying out in detail
for potential suitors how they could reduce news staffs at their 32
papers and make the papers themselves considerably smaller. That
is hardly cheering news after the wave of job cuts Knight Ridder itself
imposed in 2005.
Knight-Ridder’s tight-lipped spokesman, Polk Laffoon IV, stepped up with a public reply.
That is only one option being discussed, he said, and the company is
still considering a range of scenarios including rejecting the bids if
they come in too low.
For those rooting for a happy ending in
terms of news quality, one positive is that McClatchy was among
potential bidders who have visited the Knight Ridder brass. News
excellence is both a credo and a practice at such McClatchy papers as
the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. and The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee.
CEO
Gary Pruitt is always quick to say that a companion strategy is to
operate in fast-growing markets. Some of Knight Ridder’s weak
financial performers like the San Jose Mercury News and The Philadelphia Inquirer don’t fit the bill.
Plus it remains a mystery how McClatchy could swallow Knight Ridder, which is three times its size.
Stay
tuned — more to come next week. Plus public companies will continue to
report fourth quarter 2005 financial results, neither fabulous nor
terrible among those who kicked off this round of earnings
updates.
Gillmor Not an Entrepreneur; Google News Takes Down Beta Sign
Steve Outing
Senior Editor
A significant headline this week in the world of new media was that Dan Gillmor announced that he is abandoning his for-profit citizen-journalism venture, Bayosphere.
Gillmor, of course, is the author of “We the Media,” and regarded by
many as the brightest light in the Citizen Journalism (citJ) space.
What the globe-trotting citJ pioneer is doing instead is focusing on his new non-profit Center for Citizen Media,
which is being funded and supported by the University of California
Graduate School of Journalism and the Berkman Center for Internet &
Society at Harvard University Law School. (Disclaimer: I’m on the
advisory board of the Center for Citizen Media.)
What should we make of this? When a leader of the citJ movement
can’t figure out a business model, does this spell doom for the whole
concept? While those traditionalists who cling to the notion that
citizen media is a bad idea may take heart, I don’t think this
development means much. As Gillmor himself admitted in his letter to
Bayosphere users, he may be more of a “dot-org” kind of guy than a
“dot-com” one.
And I know from my own conversations with Gillmor that he’s as
committed as ever to the idea that citizen involvement in media is the
way of the future. He’ll be taking an academic approach to furthering
citJ rather than an entrepreneurial one.
Another significant development this week was that Google took the “beta” sign off its popular Google News service — after three years! (It’s not unusual for Google to keep some of its projects in beta mode for long periods.)
This will be worth watching. Speculation is that now that Google
News is “for real,” Google might start putting ads on its pages. Don’t
be surprised to see AdWords contextual text ads show up.
It will be interesting to see how news publishers react to such a
move since Google News will be making money from their content, in
effect. I think any protest by publishers would be much ado about
nothing. News-search services like Topix.net make money from Google AdSense
ads, and no one complains much about that. But historically, there are
always a few publishers who don’t see the long view and complain about
stuff like this; I suspect we’ll see the same thing if and when Google
places ads on Google News.
My advice: Be happy that in these days of unbundled media, Google News and other news search-engine/aggregators are driving substantial traffic to your various bits of content.
Black History Month
David Shedden
Library Director
Feb. 1 is the beginning of Black History Month. During February,
and throughout the year, many media organizations will be looking for
local stories about the civil rights movement and other events in
African-American history.
As we wait to see what new stories will be presented next week, we
might want to look back at some examples from the past few years:
They Changed the World: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
Montgomery Advertiser, 2005
Back in the Day: Indiana’s African-American History
The Indianapolis Star, 2002
Portraits in Black History and The Deuces
St. Petersburg Times, 2002
Voices: Hear the Voices of Savannah’s Black Heritage
Savannah Morning News, 2001
Through Spokane’s Eyes: Moments in Black History
The Spokesman-Review, 2001
Central High: 40 Years Later
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 2000
Greensboro Sit-Ins: Launch of a Civil Right Movement
News & Record, 1998, updated 2004
For more information about Black History Month, visit: Links to the News: Black History Month
The Katrina Narrative, the African Union, Haitian Elections, James Frey and the Week Ahead
Meg Martin
Naughton Fellow
What most surprised you in media this week?
Anne Hull’s story in Sunday’s Washington Post, “A Company Town on the Mississippi,”
about the Domino Sugar Co.’s rebuilding efforts in Arabi, La. It was a
compelling national reminder that, four months after the storm, the
story of the people Hurricane Katrina left behind continues. It was an
unexpected Sunday gem.
What was underplayed?
We didn’t hear much about the African Union’s summit in Khartoum, Sudan this week, or about the country’s decision to drop its bid to lead the organization. I would have liked to have seen a greater volume and depth in coverage of the meeting. Attention to the violence in Haiti, too, as the country prepares for national elections, was sparse.
What was overplayed?
The James Frey/”A Million Little Pieces” fracas. It seemed to be a story that fascinated journalists,
for its clear implications and applications to their own work, but one
that had less impact for the general public. We (readers) missed out on
a teaching moment with the coverage of this incident; one in which
journalists could have delved into the story’s larger implications: the
differences between “truth” and “fact,” particularly as they apply to
publishing, and the ideas of artistic license and integrity. The
lessons are far-reaching and the relevance considerable.
What will we still be talking about?
I’d suspect that the Hamas victory over Fatah in the Palestinian parliament will be a topic of constant coverage into the next week. And, perhaps obviously, the Senate’s vote over Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination will probably figure prominently in next week’s headlines, as well.
