What do journalists create? A brief glossary
The labels we attach to the fruit of our labors mean something
The word “article” was rarely uttered in the four newsrooms where I worked in my career: The University of Houston student newspaper, the Daily Cougar; the Conroe Courier; the Galveston Daily News; and, from 1979 to 2019, the Houston Chronicle. We referred to the collections of words we assembled as “stories.” During my first decade or so at the Chronicle, we often used “sty” in internal communications as a substitute for “story,” but that practice faded away. It only saved two letters, after all.
“Story” actually had multiple meanings. Telling a colleague, “Good story,” after publication meant we admired the reporting and writing skill that went into producing it. At the outset of a reporting project, we might say, “that’s a good story,” referring to the premise. You have documents showing that the mayor steered a contract to a business owned by his brother-in-law? Good story. You’ve landed an exclusive interview with the sole survivor of a mass shooting? Good story. These are the scrambled eggs of journalism: It’s hard to mess them up.
In the last 20 years or so of my career, I watched the nomenclature change as the ways people consumed news evolved beyond text and photographs in print. Video. Podcasts. Journalists interviewing one another. Social media. Newspapers became “news organizations,” or “news outlets.”
New terms emerged, and old ones changed, to cover these new forms. Here’s my take — incomplete, obviously — on the current taxonomy:
“Story.” The original and best. Journalists are still telling stories; the delivery mechanism may change, but a story is a tale (a true one, in journalism) with a beginning, middle and end; with dramatic tension; with intellectual and/or emotional resonance.
“Article.” OK, but a bit sterile.
“Piece.” Pretentious, ultimately meaningless. I’ll confess I’ve used it myself in referring to the work I’ve published on this newsletter; mea culpa. A better term for most of my Substack stuff is “personal essay.”
“Post,” noun. Could be anything published online. Gibberish. Poetry in Pig Latin.
And my absolute least favorite . . .
“Content.”
Where to start with this suddenly ubiquitous word? (OK, maybe not so suddenly; it’s been around a while, but I’m using geologic time.) If you place the accent on the second syllable, of course — conTENT — it’s an adjective meaning happy, satisfied, pleased. CONtent is a noun meaning, well . . . something stuffed inside something else. Empty the content of your pockets before stepping into the scanner, sir. Of course, the noun form of the word can be part of a noble message: “I have a dream,” Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1963, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But that’s a rare application. In journalism, “content” means everything produced by the reporters, editors, photographers, audience teams, web designers, and others who labor to bring news to the public. NPR, among many other media organizations, is led not by an editor but by a “chief content officer.”
I’m not naive; I understand that even in the heyday of print, much of the text that appeared in newspapers (and, later, on their companion websites) was not poetry. Describing it as “content” would not be amiss: It’s straightforward, formulaic, predictable. But it doesn’t represent everything journalists produce. Whenever a writer in possession of an interesting set of facts, and an idea about a novel way to present them, sits down at a typewriter or a computer keyboard or a Big Chief tablet, there’s a chance for inspiration. For magic. For art.
Here’s my late friend and colleague Susan Carroll in a dispatch for the Houston Chronicle from Piedras Blancas, Guatemala, in 2012:
Leonel Tipaz de León stretched out on the wood-framed bed in his parents’ tiny adobe home, its peeling, aqua shutters closed to the stifling afternoon heat.
At 21, he already was tired of life, of toiling for less than $7 a day in the cornfields that surround his family’s farm high in the Sierra de Chuacús mountains, of scraping by with odd jobs and selling natural medicines. He wanted nice things, Nike shoes, his own home.
He longed to leave this pristine, Mayan village and join his sister on a dairy farm outside of Amarillo, where he could make $400 a week feeding and milking cows and cleaning up manure. He could save money and send some home.
What followed was a compelling, heartbreaking narrative about a young man whose dreams exceeded his luck. He died in the rear seat of a pickup truck driven by smugglers that crashed in South Texas. Susan told his story simply and beautifully. Johnny Hanson’s photographs brought his dusty Guatemalan village to life as his family prepared to bury him. Susan wrote:
Fifteen men, some dressed in slacks for the funeral, piled into two pickup trucks to ride to the cemetery to dig Diego’s grave. They measured it out with blue twine, and took turns swinging a heavy, red pickax. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. The soft soil gave way to hard, reddish rock.
This is not “content.” To slap such a label on it is to dishonor its author, its subject and the power of the written word in the hands of a master like Susan Carroll. Let’s aspire to more.