CJR - Tell it Long, Take Your Time, Go in Depth, by Steve Weinberg

Some newspapers are giving writers a wealth of time and space, urging them to get intimate with subjects. The call it Immersion Journalism

by Steve Weinberg
Weinberg, a CJR contributing editor, is a former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors. He teaches journalism at the University of Missouri, and is working on a biography of Ida Tarbell.

The standards that guide newspapers have been updated in some newsrooms to better harmonize with the conventional wisdom of the '90s: 1) Keep it short -- readers have tiny attention spans. 2) Don't dig too deeply -- libel and invasion-of-privacy lawsuits drain profits. 3) Stick to the time-tested definitions of news -- crime, politics, sports, celebrities. 4) Keep reporting costs low. Way low.

But some reporters and editors have found an intriguing way to break free from those restraints. A significant and growing number of them are publishing in-depth narratives based on months of high-cost, high-risk immersion journalism. They are injecting real storytelling into their stories, producing memorable narratives, long ones, about the not-so-ordinary aspects of ordinary life.

A case in point is the Baltimore Sun's "A Stage in Their Lives," written by Ken Fuson and published in June -- a 16,000-word series covering seventeen broadsheet pages over six days.

Earlier, for fifteen years at The Des Moines Register, Fuson worked to perfect this unorthodox brand of newspaper reporting. In 1996 the Sun's editors, as part of a concerted effort to alter the daily's tone, lured him to Baltimore. To write "A Stage in Their Lives," he immersed himself for four months in the lives of students playing key roles in their high school's production of West Side Story. It was a challenge, and Fuson succeeded. On one level, his series is a tale about the production of a high school musical. On a deeper level it is a masterful story about teenagers coming of age in the complicated 1990s.

Magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Rolling Stone have published this brand of journalism, off and on, for decades. Book publishers in the business of depth journalism have offered outstanding examples from authors such as J. Anthony Lukas, Tracy Kidder, and Nicholas Lemann. Newspapers large enough to publish Sunday magazines occasionally encouraged this kind of writing before the 1990s.

Sunday magazines are shrinking, but this form of newspaper journalism is not. These days immersion journalism is finding a safe home -- along with occasional controversy -- in the broadsheet pages of such papers as The Seattle Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the St. Petersburg Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, and the Providence Journal-Bulletin, not to mention the Sun.

Newspapers are producing valuable, innovative, and sometimes beautiful examples of this against-the-grain kind of work. Writers are drawing readers into what are sometimes the equivalent of books, testing the notion that readers still like to read.

Immersion journalism has a history at the Sun. In 1979, at the Evening Sun, the morning paper's now-defunct partner, Jon Franklin won the first of two Pulitzer Prizes for a work of narrative immersion journalism, "Mrs. Kelly's Monster."

Franklin had been working up to such an opportunity. For years at the Evening Sun he sought topics that would allow him to use the techniques of fiction "while observing all the journalistic niceties," as he puts it. "I went out and looked for stories that fit that way of doing it. I practiced. I did a story about a day in the life of a dog catcher. I did a day in the life of a profoundly retarded man."

"Mrs. Kelly's Monster" started out to be a feature on a woman undergoing brain surgery. Franklin assumed the surgery would be successful, ending Mrs. Kelly's fifty-seven years of pain. He interviewed Mrs. Kelly and her husband. He talked to her daughter separately and with Dr. Thomas Barbee Ducker, the surgeon. That was it, he figured, except for showing up at the hospital to look for his ending. Then the surgery went wrong. Mrs. Kelly died.

Franklin assumed that he had lost his story. Later he had a revelation: he would write about the surgery through Dr. Ducker's eyes. The 4,000-word story that emerged opens this way:

In the cold hours of a winter morning Dr. Thomas Barbee Ducker, chief brain surgeon at the University of Maryland Hospital, rises before dawn. His wife serves him waffles but no coffee. Coffee makes his hands shake.

In 1985, Franklin won his second Pulitzer for another long-form piece, "The Mind Fixers," about the new science of molecular psychiatry. Then he left to start a teaching career at the the University of Maryland and the University of Oregon. In 1986, his book Writing for Story (Atheneum) explained step by step how to practice the kind of journalism that had won him honors.

In Baltimore, however, Franklin's brand of journalism made only rare appearances in the Sun after his departure. Not many reporters knew how to carry it off, and not many editors encouraged them. "Hard news is cheaper," Franklin says. "Event-oriented news is easier for editors to predict and control."

Then, in the early 1990s, John Carroll and Bill Marimow accepted jobs as editor and managing editor of the Sun. Carroll, a Sun reporter from 1966 to 1972, returned in 1991 after high-level editing jobs at The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Lexington Herald-Leader. In Kentucky, Carroll had retained Franklin as a consultant to discuss storytelling with the newsroom staff. After becoming the Sun's editor, Carroll hired Marimow, who had won two Pulitzers for investigative reporting at the Inquirer before becoming a city editor there.

"I love in-depth reporting and writing, and so does John," Marimow says. "We were looking for people to practice literary journalism based on great reporting." Both men had been influenced by editor Gene Roberts at The Philadelphia Inquirer, before he left to teach and then to become managing editor at The New York Times. Under Roberts the Inquirer had dominated investigative reporting during the 1970s and 1980s. Immersion/narrative journalism had taken something of a back seat to fact-driven exposŽs, but it was not absent.

In particular, Donald Drake, the Inquirer's medical writer, had parlayed his interest in playwriting to develop his narrative storytelling based on immersion reporting. Five years in a row he spent almost half his time chronicling the successes and disappointments of one class at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Eventually Roberts hired a new medical writer to cover the hard news on the beat so Drake could concentrate on long-form storytelling.

Today, Drake's title at the Inquirer is assistant metropolitan editor, and he works with daily reporters, encouraging them to inject storytelling into their quick-turnaround pieces. He also works with veterans such as Stacey Burling and Michael Vitez on their long-term immersion projects. Vitez won a 1997 Pulitzer for his project, "Final Choices: Seeking The Good Death," an extended piece about the choices that dying people and their families make. Drake helped Burling with her "Community of Hope: Waiting for a Heart," in which the readers observed transplant candidates living on the same hospital corridor, wondering daily who would get the next available heart and who would leave in a box.

At the Sun, Carroll and Marimow searched for a new generation of Donald Drakes and Jon Franklins. This has led to blockbuster stories like "God's Other Plan," a January 1997 narrative serial by reporter Patricia Meisol about a lawyer going through pregnancy while dying of cancer; "The Umpire's Sons," a December 1996 story by Lisa Pollak about the lives of two boys fathered by John Hirschbeck, the major league baseball umpire spat upon by Roberto Alomar, and the genetic disease that had killed one while afflicting the other; "Witness to Slavery," a June 1996 narrative series by Gregory Kane and Gilbert A. Lewthwaite about the slave trade in Sudan; and "Spreading the Word," a July 1997 series by Ginger Thompson, who traveled to Peru to immerse herself in the world of two American linguists doubling as missionaries.

Then there is Ken Fuson, who works with Jan Winburn, an editor Carroll and Marimow hired from The Hartford Courant, who had been Fuson's editor nearly two decades earlier at the Columbia, Missouri, Daily Tribune. Fuson's "A Stage in Their Lives" is perhaps the most counterintuitive of all the Sun's recent narrative immersion stories, since a high school play is by definition both chaotic and ordinary.

Indeed, as he hung out with students day after day, Fuson started worrying about how he would organize the sprawling piece. He found himself with at least fifteen characters, too many for a focused narrative. He emerged from his dilemma after a conversation with Lisa Pollak, his Sun colleague, who suggested he concentrate on those with the most at stake.

The five students Fuson chose were pictured on each of the six days the story ran, with a soap opera-like caption under each photograph. On day one, the cutline under Angie Guido's picture says, "She has a vision of herself in the starring role. But wait -- another girl stands in the way." On day two: "She finds out today -- is she Maria? No other role will do." And so on.

Spellbound she sits, her mother on one side, her boyfriend on the other, as another young woman performs the role that will someday be hers.

Since she was little, Angie Guido has dreamed of standing on stage, playing the Puerto Rican girl who falls in love with the boy named Tony.

It won't be long, Angie thinks as she delights in a touring company production of West Side Story at the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore. She and twenty members of the Drama Club from North County High School in Anne Arundel County attend the December show with a few parents. This is a prelude; there is expectant talk they will stage the same show for their spring musical.

Someday soon, Angie hopes, she will own the role that is rightfully hers. She has been a loyal drama club soldier, serving on committees, singing in the chorus when she yearned for a solo, watching lead roles slip away because she didn't look the part. But Maria is short, as she is, and dark, as she is, and more than that, Angie is a senior. This will be her last spring musical. Her last chance to shine.

But on the very next night, in that very same theater, another girl from North County High School sits spellbound, her mother on one side, her best friend on the other.

Reader response was overwhelmingly positive. Fuson heard from teenagers who had read every word, from parents who had been captivated. Carroll and Marimow are so certain that their brand of long-form journalism is good business that they are building reporting and editing staffs to do more of it.

For daily newspapers, with a news cycle that seems to spin ever faster, the most revolutionary of the elements of immersion/narrative reporting is the immersion itself -- the ability to take the time to get it right.

At the St. Petersburg Times, Anne Hull took six months to immerse herself in the lives of a male teenaged assailant and a female Tampa police officer whose fates intertwined on July 4, 1992, when the teenager held a gun to her skull and pulled the trigger, although the gun misfired. Hull had learned immersion journalism from her newspaper colleague Tom French, who used it that year to show day-to-day life at a high school.

G. Wayne Miller at the ProvidenceJournal-Bulletin also entered that challenging world of high school, in 1992-1993, by immersing himself in the lives of two students. Among other practitioners and proselytizers who have achieved recognition are Terrie Claflin at the Medford, Oregon, Mail Tribune, David Hanners at The Dallas Morning News, Richard Ben Cramer and Steve Twomey at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Eric Nalder at The Seattle Times, David Finkel at three newspapers (the Tallahassee Democrat, the St. Petersburg Times, and The Washington Post,) Jack Hart at the Portland Oregonian, and Roy Peter Clark, who has written for the St. Petersburg Times while teaching at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

Walt Harrington, who left The Washington Post last year to free-lance and teach at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, says his goal is "to understand other people's worlds from the inside out, to portray people as they understand themselves. Not the way they say they understand themselves, but the way they really understand themselves. The way, as a subject once told me, you understand yourself 'when you say your prayers in a quiet room.'"

That kind of understanding rarely comes quickly. In journalism, time sometimes equals truth. Tom Wolfe, in a 1972 essay, called this patient, deep reporting an "essential first move" because scenes, not just disparate facts, are necessary to write compelling narrative. "Therefore," Wolfe wrote, "your main problem as a reporter is, simply, managing to stay with whomever you are writing about long enough for the scenes to take place before your own eyes . . . . The initial problem is always to approach total strangers, move in on their lives in some fashion, ask questions you have no natural right to expect answers to, ask to see things you weren't meant to see . . . . Many journalists find it so ungentlemanly, so embarrassing, so terrifying even, that they are never able to master this."

Leon Dash almost fell into this trap at the beginning of his work on "When Children Want Children," his 1986 Washington Post series (expanded into a 1989 book) on why so many urban teenagers became involved in out-of-wedlock births. It was thirteen years ago that he rented a basement room in an economically depressed District of Columbia neighborhood, struggling to understand a different world by living in it.

He had resisted the suggestion of his Post editor, Bob Woodward, at first, because he thought he already knew many of the answers. As he wrote in the prologue of his book, "I assumed that the high incidence of teenage pregnancy among poor, black urban youths nationwide grew out of youthful ignorance both about birth-control methods and adolescent reproductive capabilities. I also thought the girls were falling victim to cynical manipulation by the boys . . . . I was wrong on all counts."

It was not until five weeks after moving to the Highlands that Dash realized that without immersion he would have missed the truth -- that so many of these girls chose pregnancy to gain the attention and respect they were desperate for. The realization came during an interview with a sixteen-year-old girl who was beginning to trust him. It took Dash another year of immersion in the neighborhood to fill in the gaps. Part of the process is talking to sources again and again. One young woman who told Dash the truth did so in the fifth hour of her third interview.

From 1988 to 1994, Dash spent considerable time on one family. The result was an eight-part Post series titled "Rosa Lee's Story," followed by a book. Dash met Rosa Lee Cunningham in 1988. At age fifty-two, she was serving time in the District of Columbia jail for selling heroin. A mother at age fourteen, Rosa Lee had given birth to eight children by five fathers, and had more than thirty grandchildren when she and Dash started talking. Six of her children had followed her into a life of crime.

When Dash suggested that he spend time with her after her release, she agreed, saying maybe her story would help others avoid her path. In journalistic terms, those years paid off, but Dash had trouble drawing the line between observation and friendship.

He managed to produce outstanding journalism while straddling the line, but others fail. As Tom Wolfe noted in his anthology The New Journalism (Harper & Row), "If a reporter stays with a person or group long enough, they -- reporter and subject -- will develop a personal relationship . . . . They become stricken with a sense of guilt, responsibility, obligation . . . . People who become overly sensitive on this score inevitably turn out second-rate work, biased in such banal ways that they embarrass even the subjects they think they are 'protecting.'"

Not everybody, though. Kidder mentioned a carpenter he saw regularly while researching the book, House (Houghton-Mifflin). "I remember his saying at one point that he and the other builders ought to put a bell around my neck, so they'd know where I was at all times."

Acornerstone of this journalism trend is an emphasis on noncelebrities. They could be called "ordinary people," except that journalists choosing them believe part of the job is to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Several journalists who focus on non-celebrities cite this quotation from historian Will Durant: "Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river."

Walt Harrington's focus on life along the banks is evident from the titles of the three books collecting his pieces: American Profiles: Somebodies and Nobodies Who Matter; At the Heart of It: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives (both University of Missouri Press); and Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life (Sage). Harrington is puzzled by journalists in general, and at many newspapers in particular, who fail to chronicle the "momentous events of everyday life."

But he recognizes that it can be difficult to do. With notable exceptions, Harrington writes in Intimate Journalism, "What passes for everyday-life journalism is too often a mishmash of superficial stories about Aunt Sadie cooking pies, unlikely heroes who save people from drowning or drag them from burning buildings, the nice kid next door who turns out to be a serial killer, and poor people who, against the odds, make it to the top. There's nothing wrong with such stories, except that too often they are the end point of everyday-life coverage, reported and edited with the left hand by people unschooled and unaware of the intricate assumptions and techniques of intimate journalism, which results in stories made superficial by both accident and design."

The word "story" is often misused in journalism. Not that many newspaper articles are really stories. They rarely have beginnings, middles, and ends, rarely include foreshadowing, rarely are shot through with narrative drive. That kind of storytelling technique takes years to master.

Tom Wolfe, in a 1972 essay, emphasized four devices: scene-by-scene construction, presenting each scene through the mind of a particular character, extended dialogue between characters, and inclusion of details (how they dress, how they furnish a home, how they treat superiors and subordinates) symbolic of the characters' status lives.

Although Wolfe's precepts are alive, it is Jon Franklin's book Writing for Story that almost certainly has influenced the largest number of current newspaper writers, with Harrington's three books further supplementing it. Franklin, in turn, looks to writers of fiction, and writers who describe fiction techniques. His own bible is Robert Meredith and John Fitzgerald's The Professional Story Writer and His Art (Crowell, 1963).

Almost any topic worthy of immersion is worthy of lengthy treatment. But discipline is also key. At the Evening Sun, Franklin recalls "writing long" usually meant merely including more detail. Zoning stories "became, well, complete."

G. Wayne Miller, of the ProvidenceJournal-Bulletin, says that without a talented, forceful editor, his stories would sometimes be too long. Recalling his seven-part immersion series about the Hasbro toy company, he wrote recently, in the paper's self-published How I Wrote the Story collection: "My initial outline was for eight parts, but my editors said 'too much.' They were right. Thus whittled, my concerns became character development, dramatic tension, detail, and subtext -- the ironies and paradoxes, some subtle, some not, that told the real story."

Yet the best writers say the real key is the investment of time. An example: journalists profiling professional hockey coach Mike Keenan, while he was with the St. Louis Blues, tended to focus on his volatile temper, his sometimes bizarre behavior during a game. Gary Smith, a magazine writer who started on the sports pages of the Wilmington Journal and the Philadelphia Daily News, went places other writers had not gone, including the apartment where Keenan lived at the time, as well as the inner landscapes of Keenan's mind. Here is Smith's lead, from May 8, 1995, in Sports Illustrated:

His home was a three-bedroom unit on the sixteenth floor, filled with the furniture of forgetting. All whites and blacks and glass and metal; each morning, in such a place, was surely the dawn of a clean, fresh start.

The one old thing was his leather briefcase, worn and cracked as an old fisherman's face. "It's the only thing in my life," he remarked, "that I haven't thrown out."

But, it turned out, that wasn't quite true. Late one night, as he tried to explain himself over Amarettos, he fell silent and knelt in front of a small bookcase in his living room. Finally he stood.

"No one who has ever written about me," Mike Keenan said, "has a _______ clue who I am." Then he handed The Great Gatsby to me, as if that were proof.

The paperback book was a quarter-century old, yellowing and marked in a variety of inks -- sentences he had underlined, words and exclamation points he had scribbled in the margins at different junctures since he was a teen. His eyes glittered as he watched me leaf through it. "It's much more complicated," he pointed out, "than anyone really thinks."