Interpretive journalism

Overview

Journalism is typically thought of as striving for objectivity. The journalist's role is to report the story but stand apart from it. However, this does not mean that there is never room for the journalist's opinion, provided it is clear where the story ends and the opinion begins. Further, sometimes opinions form part of the story in the first place—a disagreement about climate change among members of government, for example, or a political candidate making false statements in a campaign speech are newsworthy events in which the expression of a stance is the substance of the event. Presenting these events without any sort of comment or analysis—failing to challenge an opinion or fact-check a false statement—may meet a technical definition of objectivity, but fails to inform the audience, and may even mislead the audience. Interpretive journalism is also an alternative to the "breaking news" approach, which simply reports the news that has just happened, before much can be learned or absorbed—an approach to news that only became possible in the late twentieth century, and which in the twenty-first came to represent a larger proportion of the average consumer's news intake due to mobile apps and cable news. Margaret Sullivan, the former public editor of the New York Times, referred to interpretive journalism as a "second day" approach—journalism informed by hindsight and being able to take the time to gather contextual information and analysis.

Interpretive journalism is a mode of journalism that provides an interpretation of the facts, which usually means providing some context or analysis, rather than the "just the facts" presentation of "straight news." Interpretive journalism is sometimes contrasted with objective journalism, but this can be a misleading construction: Interpretive journalism need not be biased or partisan, but rather simply goes beyond a bare-facts accounting. An in-depth profile of a basketball player that examines the patterns of performance in his career and the challenges he's faced, rather than a simple report of how his team performed in last week's series against the division rival, can be an example of interpretive journalism without taking a side on any particular issue. That said, any sort of analysis is subject to bias, which makes it important to clearly delineate between what is demonstrably true and what is supposed or proposed by the journalist.

Interpretive journalism overlaps with both investigative journalism, in which journalists spend considerable time researching and investigating a single topic of serious interest, and advocacy journalism, in which the journalist transparently declares a non-objective stance in reporting on a news topic and advocating for a particular course of action or opinion. In most cases, interpretive journalism involves less original research than investigative journalism; and while advocacy journalism may be interpretive, not all interpretive journalism is advocacy journalism. Like New Journalism, interpretive journalism is sometimes called story-driven journalism, typically following different conventions than the inverted pyramid of traditional objective journalism.

Some of the issues surrounding interpretive journalism stem from the relationships between objectivity, impartiality, transparency, and comprehensibility. In practice, the subject matter often dictates the approach, or a range of approaches. A traffic accident can be reported without further comment, but if it is the fifth fatal accident of the year at the same intersection, that is context that is necessary to understanding the story; if that intersection is newly constructed and questions about its safety were raised in planning sessions, and the contract was awarded to a firm owned by a city official's in-law, those elements too invite some interpretation and contextualizing.

Further Insights

News media have always included an interpretive element, but interpretive journalism in its current form began during coverage of World War I. Because the causes of the war were so complex, and were preceded by geopolitical developments to which Americans had paid little attention, more and more newspapers began adding relevant context to their war coverage. This continued in coverage of the complicated Teapot Dome scandal, the Great Depression, and the many debates over New Deal legislation.

In 1923, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden founded Time magazine, the first weekly news magazine in the United States. Time's mandate was very specific to the era in which it launched: It would cover the news in a way that offered sufficient context that the reader could understand the import of what was going on, and would cover all the important news of the week, but could be read in an hour or less. More in-depth coverage remained, for the time, the province of monthly cultural commentary magazines such as The Atlantic (founded in 1857) and Harper's (founded in 1850). Two years after the founding of Time, Harold Ross and his wife, New York Times reporter Jane Grant, founded The New Yorker, which began as a weekly humor magazine but soon became one of the foremost venues for long-form journalism. Newsweek, which became Time's main competitor, was founded in 1933.

As television news expanded—particularly with the advent of color television, and the growth of the weeknight news program from 15 minutes to 30 minutes, both in the 1960s—new norms of journalism developed. Even the most staid television news anchor is a more dynamic presence than newsprint on a page, and television news stories are accompanied whenever possible with images or footage. The "grammar" of television news that developed shaped stories more narratively, and less serious stories came to be told more conversationally. The sports and weather coverage developed their own norms and tropes, with both expected to be what we would call interpretive—sports coverage on television rarely limits itself to a game report or a player's injury, instead musing how this development impacts the team's playoff prospects; weather coverage, itself grounded in a science that interprets probabilistic data, turns dry jargon about fronts and computer models into a narrative about the likely course of the next few days of weather.

In the twenty-first century, traditional news media needed to compete for attention in ways they had not previously faced. With more and more Americans getting their news online—often accessing local newspapers' websites, but without subscribing either digitally or to the hard copy of the paper—newspapers went through series of significant contractions and layoffs. Television news became more partisan on some cable networks, while others attempted to strike a balance by airing opposing opinions unchallenged, without devoting much time to context or fact-checking. Presumably in an attempt to better capture the reader's interest, print media—both on paper and online—began emphasizing anecdotal and "human interest" angles even in hard news stories. A story about factory layoffs might begin with a lede about a third-generation factory-worker's family and the impact of the job loss on them. A story about Medicaid expansion might begin with a discussion about a young person struggling with the day to day expenses of chronic illness.

One of the reasons "straight news" without adornment became marginalized was that the Internet, mobile apps, and 24/7 cable news channels meant that even casual news consumers were subject to frequent "breaking news" alerts. It made sense, if outlets expected the audience to read news stories about events that happened the day before or even earlier that day, to offer more than the bare facts that had already been conveyed on a cable station crawl or in a push alert to a mobile phone.

This inevitably attracted complaint, especially but not exclusively from older readers. Some saw context as editorializing, in many cases. Fact-checking a political candidate's false or misleading statements could be read as a comment on that candidate's honesty, or the suitability of the platform introduced in his or her speech. Beginning a story about Medicaid expansion, instituted under the Affordable Care Act, with a sympathetic story of someone in need of affordable health care instead of a conservative family perceiving the ACA as an authoritarian government's overstep, could similarly be taken as endorsement of a political idea, rather than simple reporting of facts.

Journalism has always faced these kinds of dilemmas. Even choosing which stories to cover is a decision that can be considered partisan—and which in some cases is. Even apart from partisanship, perceived or actual, another reason for complaint about these kinds of stories was practical: they take longer to read, and longer to determine what the story is about. Stories opening with an anecdote abandon the familiar inverted pyramid format of traditional journalism, in which the bare facts are presented up front, and elaborated upon with "softer" content that follows.

Adding context and background to a story inevitably shapes how that story is received, and when there are patterns to the way coverage of a specific topic is framed, this in turn influences the public's understanding of that topic (Taylor & Gunby, 2016). For example, a study of interpretive journalism's framing of climate change found that, despite complaints about an increasing tendency for news media to present "both sides" of disputes without sufficient fact-checking and contextualizing, in this area, coverage had shifted from a "both sides" approach to one that regularly challenged and discredited climate change deniers. At the same, it was accompanied by another shift: interpretive journalism's coverage of climate change had increased its focus on the "warner vs. denier" narrative, which was used to frame many articles about climate change while ignoring actual, legitimate debates in relevant scientific fields about climate change specifics, such as the best strategies for remediation, or which anthropogenic factors are the most harmful (Bruggemann & Engesser, 2016).

Issues

In the 1960s and 1970s, a movement within journalism reacted strongly against the traditional admonition to keep the reporter out of the story. Tom Wolfe popularized the term "New Journalism" to refer to work by himself, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Terry Southern, and others, which was primarily published in cultural commentary magazines, including the brief-lived but influential Scanlan's Monthly, which published Hunter S. Thompson's first major piece, "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." In this article, Thompson attended the 1970 Kentucky Derby. Rather than simply report on the race itself—which Thompson and his artist, Ralph Steadman, were not able to actually see from where they were in the stands—Thompson wrote a manic first-person narrative about his weekend and a commentary on the drinking, partying, and misbehavior of the crowds. Thompson became the pioneer of "gonzo journalism"—journalism that abandons claims of objectivity, positions the journalist as the protagonist in a first-person narrative, and tends toward the satirical.

Not all New Journalism was gonzo journalism. Compared with Thompson's work, Wolfe's pieces were staid, and much of the early work in New Journalism would no longer feel revolutionary by the end of the twentieth century. In its day, however, it was vital in throwing off some of the restraints of traditional journalism—not abandoning the facts but acknowledging that objectivity was sometimes a façade, that pretending the reporter was invisible was not always possible. Mailer had begun as a fiction writer, and when he turned his hand to nonfiction, he brought many of the conventions of fiction to it; Capote took a similar approach to true crime, and his nonfiction book In Cold Blood (1966) is structured like a novel.

One of the first New Journalists was Gay Talese, who wrote for The New York Times and Esquire in the 1960s. Though not the first journalist to take a literary approach to the work, his talent and choice of subjects helped popularize the form. His profiles of pop culture figures like Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra read like short stories, wildly different from what was typically found in magazines covering celebrity news. The same year Capote published his "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood, Talese began researching a book about the Bonanno crime family, published in 1971 as Honor Thy Father. In 1981, he published Thy Neighbor's Wife, a free-ranging exploration of American sexuality in (primarily) the 1970s. It was a key example of the experiential element of New Journalism: Talese did not limit himself to reporting on others' experiences, but spent months at the nudist resort Sandstone.

George Plimpton had helped introduce that experiential element in what was also called "participatory journalism." Like Talese or Thompson, Plimpton wrote works that positioned himself as a journalist-protagonist, albeit without Thompson's gonzo approach. He was especially known for his sports work: He pitched for the American League in an exhibition game in 1958, for example, and his experiences as a backup quarterback at the Detroit Lions training camp in 1963 were written up in his bestselling book Paper Lion, adapted into an Alan Alda film in 1968.

New Journalism never completely went away; there are media outlets that primarily publish journalist-protagonist first-person narratives, and the movement had long-lasting impacts on food writing and other "soft news" beats. In hard news coverage, New Journalism-style work became more common in book-length form from the 1980s on. Further, New Journalism provided a model for journalism that was neither a personal essay—that is, it dealt directly with newsworthy topics of public importance, rather than looking inward—nor a traditional "invisible journalist" news story.

One of the distinguishing features of New Journalism was the journalist's immersion in the subject. This was the purpose of Talese's Sandstone stay or Plimpton's quarterback training, as much as providing a narrative: fully immersing the reporter in the material. Interpretive journalism can be produced from just such immersion, but that is not required, and work that is called interpretive journalism is usually stylistically very different from New Journalism, which tends to be constructed with scenes, full dialogue, and a clear point of view (the narrative techniques of fiction, in other words).

Inevitably, New Journalists were challenged on their objectivity, a problem that plagues interpretive journalists as well.

Bibliography

Bruggemann, M., & Engesser, S. (2016). Beyond false balance: How interpretive journalism shapes media coverage of climate change. Global Environmental Change, 42, 58–67. doi: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2016.11.004

Kamerer, D. (2016). News and politics: The rise of live and interpretive journalism. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 71(1), 108–109. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=114653044&site=ehost-live

Stoker, K. L. (2022, February 1). “Journalism With the Voice of Authority: The Emergence of Interpretive Reporting at The New York Times, 1919–1931.” Sage Journals (24)8, doi.org/10.1177/14648849211072937

Sullivan, M. (2014). "Just the facts, ma'am" no more. The New York Times, 163(56393), 13. Retrieved March 12, 2024 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=94006389&site=ehost-live

Tandoc Jr., E. C., & Jenkins, J. (2018). Out of bounds? How Gawker's outing a married man fits into the boundaries of journalism. New Media & Society, 20(2), 581–598. Retrieved March 12, 2024 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=127838687&site=ehost-live

Taylor, M., & Gunby, K. (2016). Moving beyond the sound bite: Complicating the relationship between negative television news framing and in-depth reporting on activism. Sociological Forum, 31(3), 577–598. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=117787795&site=ehost-live

(2021 June 19). We recommit to investigative and interpretive journalism, support us. The Chronicles, www.chronicles.rw/2021/06/19/we-recommit-to-investigative-and-interpretive-journalism-support-us/.

Zuckerman, E. (2010). The attention deficit: Plenty of content, yet an absence of interest. Nieman Reports, 64(3), 15. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=55009006&site=ehost-live