SKIP THE SALAD, PASS THE MEAT

When I was a police reporter -- this was back in the '80s -- there were the incident reports, the neat forms that quantified all the gory details of crime into little blocks of numbers and letters -- incident time, incident location, victim's name, suspect's name.

The biggest chunk of space on those crowded forms was always set aside for the narrative, the section where the bleary-eyed cops would put pen to paper and simply tell the story of what had happened, crudely, without style or drama (sometimes without grammar). The narrative was my favorite part.

"individual," it might say, "reports that he was driving eastbound on U.S. 76, vehicle brakes failed and vehicle sideswiped tractor-trailer. Trailer was carrying cargo of nuclear waste products, so state hazardous-response team was notified ASAP. Driver of vehicle No. 1 treated at scene for what appeared to be panic attack."

And these might go on for pages! Just information, laid down in order, the stuff of news plopped down in its rawest form. A story being told. Did ya hear about the guy who crashed his station wagon into a vat of nuclear waste? Lemme tell ya.

That's a narrative. What we're seeing more and more of in the nation's newspapers is . . . the essay.

The narrative, even in its rawest form, right of the police blotter, tells a story. Things happen in a particular order. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's logical -- the physics of the street, the crash of cause and effect. The essay, even when the writing crackles and the graphics are beautiful, only conveys a viewpoint, or a lesson.

If you look at newspapers from twenty, thirty, forty years ago, they're mostly narratives. Anything else was called a feature. Then came network television, pumped-up local stations, and CNN. Narrative -- the old art of telling the story, seeing the plane crash, the building burn, the kid rescued, the athlete win, the fugitive captured -- became video. Television became the nation's storyteller of choice. What were newspapers left with? The essay.

You've seen the oil-refinery explosion six times before breakfast (seven or eight if you count the commercials for the eleven o'clock news), so we'll tell you about how safe the oil refinery near your home may be, and about trends in putting out oil fires, and about the top ten worst oil-refinery fires in history, but the narrative usually gets short shrift. TV has taken the first big bite, and its cameras have already started digesting the story for us. Newspapers have dropped a notch on the food chain of news; out teeth can't chew up the hard stuff as well as they used to.

Narrative, in this sense, is the red meat of journalism, the sinew of facts interlocked, the relentless march of cause and effect, of progression from A to B to C, of how things happen. (Well, Officer, I hit the brakes hard -- just about stood on 'em, in fact -- but the car wouldn't stop, and next thing I saw, I was heading right for this eighteen-wheeler hauling nuclear waste, and then . . .)

It grabbed you. That's narrative's power, no matter how clumsily it's written, just as the stiff prose of a police report or a potboiler novel can grab you.

The essay is different. It's journalism's salad, peppered with Baco-Bits of perception, sprinkled with crunchy factoids, tossed into a shredded mix and served with analysis crackers. The essay can be -- and often is -- a tasty meal on the reader's plate. But it's still salad. (State officials have noted an alarming trend of drivers' brakes failing near nuclear-waste trucks, and some experts link the incidents to a general increase in auto accidents nationwide . . .)

Call it analysis, call it enterprise reporting, nominate it for awards -- it's an essay if it doesn't have the rough road map of narrative, of incident piled on incident, running through it. Without that kind of strong map, reporters can get lost and wander into a kind of Admiral Stockdale haze: Who am I? Why am I here? What's the story I'm telling?

That's the weakness of an essay -- it's loose of form and often lax of point. For better or worse, it's probably the form of journalism that's going to dominate the print media for the next few decades. So turn on the television and pass the salad.

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