Editor’s Corner
April 17, 2009
Reckonings and Requiems
By
Constance Hale
Spring comes later to us in Cambridge than to many parts of the world. Even though crocuses, daffodils, and hyacinths are showing their colors, the leaves have yet to unfold, and temperatures still drop precipitously some nights. The signs of warmer days give us solace, though, as this has been a particularly bitter winter.
While the world has been buffeted by battles in Gaza, Baghdad, and Kabul, and the bottom has dropped out of national and familial economies, we at the Nieman Foundation have watched as news organizations shed staffers, pared production schedules, and even, in some cases, closed their doors.
Our recent submissions have echoed the national mood: the top picks in our last batch included a son’s witty tribute to his father, an obituary of a New Orleans personality, a multimedia project on death-related occupations, and the profile that was our most recent Notable Narrative.
As we discussed the merits and demerits of these narratives about death, we found ourselves captivated by valedictory videos released by outgoing staff members at both the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News. At the risk of seeming to navel-gaze, we decided to feature them in this issue, recognizing as we did the slight irony that the final “stories” of these papers were primarily seen and continue to play online.
The simple video tributes made us want to look for other moments when narrative journalists wrote end-of-an-era elegies. One of those we found—included on our home page as Another Good Read—is Anne Hull’s “Whitman-Walker, a Longtime Front in AIDS War, Moves Out.” The piece, which appeared in December 2008 in The Washington Post, is a requiem for a building in the nation’s capital that for more than 20 years shepherded patients through the AIDS epidemic, until the nonprofit owners sold it to beat back mounting debt. The article is saved from sentimentality by Hull’s powers of writing and of observation: she notes the chandelier in the foyer that “long cast its ridiculous grandiose glow” and the old blue medical exam table “upon which a generation of bodies had settled on crinkly paper.”
Hull uses a small, intimate story to tell a large one. In The Reckoning, the great narrative journalist David Halberstam uses two big stories to tell an enormous one. Interested in understanding “America’s subtle industrial decline,” Halberstam uses the legendary Ford Motor Company and the upstart Nissan to contrast a tale of American malaise and Japanese ascent.
Not content to wait for a narrative powerhouse like Halberstam to make sense of the malaise in journalism, we at the Nieman Foundation are trying to track the forces rocking the field. Nieman Reports devoted its spring issue to “Voyages of Discovery into New Media,” and the Nieman Journalism Lab reports daily on the future of the news industry. Several sessions at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism also took the long view, helping us all remember our old passions and find new opportunities. Recordings are now available, and we encourage you to listen as top journalists reflect on these turbulent times.
We are eager to hear your thoughts as well, and have added a comments feature to the Web site so that you can join us in this and future conversations.