Soft News, Hard Sell
(Page 4 of 4)
March/April 2000
Suzanne Braun Levine The Nation (www.thenation.com/)
Here is one example of the kind of story I mean. My personal bugaboo is the dismissal time at American schools. The microcosm is the nervous parent trying to make sure a second grader has been picked up and a ninth grader is settling down in an empty apartment for an afternoon of television. The macrocosm is the assumption that it is the American Way for parents to work from 9 to 5 and kids from 8 to 3, and that the family has failed if no adult is at home during the gap. The how stories lie in between: How much anxiety do family members experience when school is out? How much productivity is lost when working parents are on the phone, frantically scrambling to patch together after-school coverage? How different is it when schedules are flexible? How much would it cost to establish programs in empty school facilities? How willing would people be to re-evaluate the school calendar and other conventions? How do they do it? How do you manage? How can we help?
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Is there a connection between this train of thought and the more conventional unconventional news story? I think so. There is certainly a connection between, for example, the questions engendered by Littleton and the life experience of every family of schoolchildren in America. And that connection is very likely to be illuminated by understanding the impact on a family of the 3 o'clock dismissal or a teenager's homework boycott.
The connections are in the storytelling; they cannot be woven together, though, when the warp of public and the weft of private experience are on different looms. Both news categories would benefit from removing barriers to the kind of understanding expected from each. 'Hard news' would mean more if its process encouraged more questions and fewer pronouncements. And 'soft news' would have more consequence if its producers aimed for more scope and grit, and everyone took it more seriously. We are all familiar with 'gotcha!' journalism; it's time for a little 'Now I get it!' journalism.
Suzanne Braun Levine is a former editor of Columbia Journalism Review. From The Nation (Nov. 22, 1999). Subscriptions: $52/yr. (47 issues) from Box 551492, Boulder, CO 80322.
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