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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: Charter Schools: A New Hope For America's Latinos (October 2, 2001) Some liberals will wonder if 'schools of color' are a good idea. It depends on whether they work. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: How to Minimize The Risks of Overreacting To Terrorism (October 2, 2001) If elements of Ashcroft's anti-terrorism bill need to be enacted quickly, so be it. But then sunset them. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: A Generational Call to Arms (October 2, 2001) 'In our grief and anger, we have found our mission and our moment,' Bush declared. By William Schneider. Media: Truth or Consequences (September 25, 2001) It's the nature of war coverage: Even the best of reporters will sometimes be flat wrong. By William Powers. Legal Affairs: The Case for Using Racial Profiling at Airports (September 25, 2001) If you were boarding an airplane, wouldn't you want authorities to scrutinize Arab passengers? By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: America, the Lightning Rod (September 25, 2001) Three-quarters of Americans say they think September 11 changed the nation 'forever.' By William Schneider. Social Studies: It Isn't America They Hate: It's the Open Society (September 25, 2001) The extremists who attacked America follow a much older tradition than Islam—one that goes back to Plato. By Jonathan Rauch. More from National Journal. |
Media 
Features Out FrontThese days, the best feature writing is usually found on pages once reserved for "serious" reports by William Powers ..... All media genres are in high form these days, but none higher than feature writing. It's tempting to think that those feature stories you're seeing every day are pretty much writing themselves. The material couldn't be more dramatic: jets crashing into skyscrapers, skyscrapers falling, the Pentagon burning. And when 6,000 people are murdered almost simultaneously, each life is a ready-made narrative. Indeed, the miniature profiles of the dead in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other papers—many clearly based on a single interview with a relative or friend—have been, for all their brevity, extremely powerful. The headlines alone are moving in their plainness. "A Passion for Cooking," said one in The Times, while elsewhere on the same page, entire lives were compressed into: "Finished What He Started," "Supported His Siblings," and "Always First to Volunteer." Under "He Kept Everyone Safe," were four short paragraphs about Daniel Suhr, a handsome 37-year-old firefighter who died when one of those who jumped from the burning towers "tumbled out of the sky and on top of him." Suhr's wife told The Times that because several other firefighters "wouldn't leave him behind" to go into the burning building, "he saved their lives." At this point, I had to put the paper down for a while. But telling the human stories that are the essence of this journalistic specialty isn't as easy as it looks. Feature writing is an art, and some are better at it than others. The Times' Francis X. Clines, the Chekhov of American newspapers, wrote a piece about the phone calls that victims made in the last minutes of their lives. As he moved toward his kicker, Clines did something that required unusual skill and confidence, departing from his subject for this coda: Eventually, the phones fell silent, like the towers and the planes. Great clouds billowed out from ground level in lower Manhattan as the skyscrapers collapsed, driving forth a storm of paperwork from victims and survivors that rained down on the grieving city. Pedestrians began collecting shreds and scraps drifting to earth. The living studied final bits of work agenda and "must do" jottings transformed into poignant messages about life's obliterated routine. The vast drift of paper and ash summoned the ultimate message of The Dead, in which James Joyce describes the swoon-like transport of ordinary souls through life as through a wintry storm: "the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." Clines's piece appeared inside the paper's Week in Review section, a place one doesn't associate with soulful feature writing. In fact, the coverage of these atrocities has thrown into relief a shift that's quietly taken place in American newspapers over the past decade. The best feature writing has migrated out of the ghettos where it was long confined—separate sections called Style or Life! or some other name suggesting insubstantiality—and onto pages formerly reserved for "serious" reporting and analysis, including the front page. To my knowledge, no one in the newspaper business has fully articulated why this happened. The standard explanation is that the softer, more entertaining, human-interest journalism pioneered by magazines such as People became so popular, it encroached on—scolds say infected—hard-news coverage. This might explain it in part, but I think another factor is what might be called the feminization of the newsroom. Newspaper staffs used to be run almost exclusively by men, and the front page reflected a typically masculine view of the world. My wife, a former feature writer for The Washington Post, complained for years that the traditional front page of a metropolitan daily read like it came straight out of a male brain, excluding subjects and points of view that women care about. Lately, as women have moved into senior editorial positions, features have slowly taken up more of the prime real estate on the front page, the business section, and other formerly male domains. Nowhere is this clearer than at The Post (where I was a writer in the 1990s), the paper that invented the feature-rich Style section back in the '70s. Much of The Post's best feature writing has moved out of Style in recent years, and onto the front. In a neat reflection of this, former Style section Editor Mary Hadar now oversees features for the front page. One day this week, The Post's front offered a long Style-ish feature about Middletown, N.J., which lost as many as 50 residents in the twin towers. On the same day, the Style section itself was given over to critical pieces about arts and media, plus a cute dispatch on the new Miss America. As women have helped reshape the front page, the Style section has reverted to the backwater status it occupied when it was "the women's pages." The most memorable feature I've read anywhere in the past few weeks, the one I've retold over and over, was a Wall Street Journal piece by Geeta Anand. It was about Chuck Irwin, a volunteer rescue worker who showed up to help at the World Trade Center despite ailments that included a stress disorder from his service in the Vietnam War. He found in the wreckage the security ID card of a woman named Ruth Ketler. Thinking she had a "kind face," he made it his business to find her loved ones. Ultimately, he met Ketler's boyfriend, who for years refused to marry her, but now says he'd do it "in a second." This piece appeared in an unexpected place: on the front of The Journal's Marketplace section, under a story about the new Windows XP operating system.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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