What Film Editors Can Teach Journalists

I’ve been spending the last several days jamming to finish the remaining few chapters of my book, which accounts for my late entry this week.

I was writing something that sparked some thoughts that I’d like to share with you.  It’s about changes in journalism and the way in which they tell stories.  I’ll paste it in here and add a few comments below it.

[NOTE: The name of the book is THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT, and deals with how we shape our stories using all of the crafts of the filmmaker. That would account for my continual mention of that phrase in the piece.]

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The Lean Forward Moment in Journalism

Journalism has certainly been undergoing major changes in the last ten years, as it moves from printed to electronic distribution. Television journalism, faced with competition from reality television and other forms, is trying to attract and keep viewers.

It has always been an axiom of journalism to begin with a strong leading paragraph (the lede). You can think of this as crafting a strong Lean Forward Moment at the very start of the piece. This is not dissimilar to beginning a television episode with a strong opening scene and is done for the same reason—to keep the audience from moving on to another story.

After the lede, journalistic style is structured around something called the inverted pyramid, in which information is presented in decreasing order of importance, leaving the audience with the expectation that they will receive much of the crucial and interesting information near the beginning of the article. In my opinion, this type of style will make it more difficult for online journalists to keep an audience attentive all of the way through a piece (it is also, I believe, one reason for the decrease in news stories which jump to other pages of a newspaper).

Vibrant news reporting, in the era of web and video presentation, will require journalists to shape their stories differently, providing periodic Lean Forward Moments, and arcs in their stories, while still maintaining journalistic integrity.
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My Additional Comments

A year or so ago I gave a talk to the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board who were all interested in how to use new media techniques to tell their news stories (I do some consulting in addition to all of my regular jobs). It is no secret that newspapers are fast disappearing, as they lose customers to television and web sites, classified ads to Craig’s List, and display ads to everyone. So most good news organizations with any money are trying to figure out a way to keep writing about the news, but incorporating Internet tools. Of course, they are being to do all of this with no increase in personnel or salaries.

It’s that bad out there for them.

We talked about a number of things, including how to use social networking and user generated content, to present local news stories that people cared about but they couldn’t afford to cover. Another thing we talked about was how to tell better, more immediate stories. In other words, how to learn from films and television in order to keep themselves relevant. We didn’t discuss it then, but it strikes me that the way in which we editors tell stories — with strong beginnings, and then a series of escalating emotional ups and down, leading to a large and satisfying denouement — is very different from what journalists do. In fact, news writers who don’t lead off with the strongest statements are often accused of “burying the lead.”

But, burying the lead a bit might not be such a bad idea in terms of emotional storytelling. It seems natural to me that you’d want to parcel out the story in continually evolving chunks, not dump it all in the beginning and hope that the reader will bother to turn to an inside page when they meet the words “Continued on page…”

In what ways do you think journalists can learn from film editors? And what can we learn from them?