Editor’s Corner
October 15, 2008
Follow the money
By
Constance Hale and Andrea Pitzer
Our last missive on October 3 included a look at financial crisis narratives. Since then, Digest readers have recommended “The Giant Pool of Money” from public radio’s This American Life. NPR’s economics correspondent Adam Davidson and This American Life producer Alex Blumberg spin a story that stretches from the planetary to the personal, finding real people to represent archetypical players in the economic implosion. They add cheeky analysis along the way, paraphrasing Alan Greenspan as telling financiers “Screw you” and suggesting that not only did loan applicants not need to have a job, but “that pulse thing. Also optional. Like the case in Ohio where 23 dead people were approved for mortgages.” You can hear the audio version or download the transcript.
Slate’s The Big Money also offers up historical narrative via its Depression Diary (in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2), which excerpts lawyer Benjamin Roth’s 1931 journal from the Great Depression. Roth uses spare language to tell a tale of lost home value and dwindling credit that could have been written last week. (“One doctor smoothed a dollar bill out on his desk the other day and said that this was all the money he had taken in for a week... There is nothing to do but work hard for less money and to cut expenses to the bone.”)
These stellar examples of nonprint narratives make us want to encourage readers to take note of the launch of the Nieman Foundation’s own Nieman Journalism Lab, “a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.” We’ll keep our focus on good stories while Lab Director Josh Benton and his staff figure out what the new new newsroom will look like.