Sad Stories
Do Readers Need Redemption?
By Bree Nordenson
When I entered Columbia University’s journalism program in August 2005, I was excited about the prospect of searching out untold stories. So for my core reporting and writing course, I chose Brownsville, a poor and relatively violent Brooklyn neighborhood, as my beat. It proved an excellent choice. I never ran into another reporter, and there were stories everywhere. One of the first stories I wrote was a profile of a woman whose ten-year-old son found a gun and accidentally shot an eleven-year-old girl in the face. I waited outside the woman’s apartment building for more than four hours, and when I finally met her, I was not surprised to learn that her life had been almost entirely defined by preternaturally bad luck. What was surprising, however, was my professor’s criticism of the profile. He said that the “relentlessly awful” events of the woman’s life made the piece virtually unreadable.
That fall, I took a course in profile writing from another professor. He was dubious about my proposal to chronicle the mental health struggles of a Vietnam veteran, and said that unless there was a silver lining to the story, no one would want to read it. I switched into the other profile writing section and began working on a piece about a talented but troubled jazz drummer in Harlem. Other students wrote about pigeon-keepers, a Spiderman impersonator, an African immigrant, and a line-dancing instructor. At one point, our professor told us that she had never taught a class that was so interested in what she called “the underdogs.”
At around that time, for yet another class, I had begun reporting on the separation of families in Latin American immigrant communities. I chose to write the piece as a profile of an Ecuadorian couple in Queens, Elena and Carlos, who had been separated from their three children for eleven years. In his comments on my first draft, my professor wrote that the principal problem with the piece was that it was “unrelentingly boo-hooey.” In later meetings, he suggested that I incorporate some “black humor” into the story.
I began to wonder, how should journalists approach “depressing” stories? Are there ways to make such stories more interesting without compromising their veracity? Must sad stories be relegated to specialized series on poverty or to a philanthropic section like “The Neediest Cases” in The New York Times? My radio documentary professor repeatedly warned that listeners tune out when they hear stories about human suffering and tragedy. “The essential problem of journalism,” he told us, “is that people don’t care about what they should care about.”
Depressing stories are often framed as dramatic narratives in an attempt to make them more palatable to readers. In a recent article in the American Journalism Review, Stephanie Shapiro identified an increase in “anguishing” human-interest stories in major U.S. newspapers. She noted that most such stories “offer lessons in spiritual stamina and redemption.” Mitzi Waltz, a journalist who writes frequently about autism and other disabilities, expressed concern over this predilection: “Editors will buy a cure story, but have little interest in the less dramatic ‘muddling through’ story that’s far more common,” she told Shapiro.
Yet depressing stories that lack a note of redemption or recovery aren’t pointless. In her graduation speech, Rebecca Castillo, our class president, spoke of her struggle with dyslexia and the hope she derived from reading articles about it. She said that stories about how other dyslexics coped with their disability — without necessarily conquering it — gave her the confidence to pursue her dream of becoming a journalist. During my interviews with Carlos and Elena, I was acutely aware of their feelings of isolation. They expressed the irrational belief that they had not achieved the American Dream because they had not worked hard enough. They had always compared themselves to what they had read or seen on television — stories of immigrant success — and were comforted when I told them about the plights of other immigrants I had interviewed.
If the media were to offer more “muddling through” stories — stories that lacked a spoonful of sugar — would it turn off their targeted readers and viewers (a largely affluent, which is not to say problem-free, bunch) who have grown accustomed to a news diet that tends to reflect their lives and interests? Would these consumers find sad stories about people struggling with problems they can’t relate to overly depressing, or even boring?
My journalism professors didn’t seem to have the answers to my questions, and many of them acknowledged (at least tacitly) a jaded reaction that comes with a long stint in any profession. They did, however, arm me with the reporting and writing skills necessary to make sad stories more than just sad. I was able to improve my profile of Carlos and Elena by discussing the extent of family separations among Latin American immigrants and by explaining the absurdity of some of the immigration policies they must contend with. I also added scenes involving an immigrant-rights activist and a psychologist, thereby giving the reader a reprieve from the couple’s suffering and from what my professor referred to as their “lonesome apartment.”
I spoke with several journalists about the challenge of writing depressing stories, and they all stressed the importance of moving beyond the mere presentation of injustice to construct narratives that emphasize unpredictable details and complex (and therefore more human) characters. In other words, we must report and write sad stories in such a way that they resist our readers’ expectations, and our own, and avoid falling back on caricature and cliché. But it takes time and space — precious commodities in journalism — to do that, which may explain why many sad stories are published as part of special series.
While it’s true that readers want to see themselves reflected in their newspapers, they also want to learn. I take comfort in a statement by Jack Fuller, the former president of Tribune Publishing, in the last chapter of his book, News Values: “Human nature drives people to take an interest in that which they do not know.” If journalists can exploit human curiosity with talented storytelling, depressing stories should be neither a risk to publish nor a chore to read.
Bree Nordenson is an assistant editor at CJR.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
