Bulletin photos by Daniel McLoone
‘Narrative tension is something that informs everything. It’s the one thing that completely distinguishes narrative writing from other conventional article writing. Use it to create a story structure and to keep readers glued to what they’re reading.’
— Steven Wilmsen,
Narrative editor,
Boston Globe
Creating narrative tension
around a central question drives good stories
By Alison Berstein
Bulletin Correspondent
Steven Wilmsen once had a predicament.
“I was a good writer. I knew how to describe, boil down, elegantly arrange language, but there was one thing I didn’t understand. I wasn’t really writing narrative stories,” he said.
Wilmsen, narrative editor at The Boston Globe, discovered the secret: narrative tension.
He shared that technique in a narrative workshop he gave at the New England First Amendment Institute, held at Northeastern University in Boston.
“Narrative tension is something that informs everything,” Wilmsen said. “It’s the one thing that completely distinguishes narrative writing from other conventional article writing. Use it to create a story structure and to keep readers glued to what they’re reading.”
Wilmsen said narrative tension lies in an unresolved question at the heart of a story.
“What is the central question?” he said. “Where does the story begin, where does the story end? The tension is which question is driving the storyline.”
The art of asking questions can go hand in hand with the practice of answering questions, Wilmsen said.
“As journalists, we’re trained from day one not to pose the question in the first place,” he said. “If there’s ever a question, we answer it. A conventional news story begins with the answer.
“Narrative writers do something completely different: they pose a question and wait for it to be answered,” he said. “That’s narrative tension, and we use it in a lot of different ways.”
Homing in on the central question helps guide the entire story, Wilmsen said.
— Steven Wilmsen
“There’s the unresolved question. The end is the resolution, it’s the answer,” he said. “Will the firefighter make it out of the burning building; will the legislator get all the votes she needs to (get) her law passed?”
Having something at stake is another key component of building tension in a story, Wilmsen said.
“If there’s no consequence to the question, then we’re not compelled to read on, there’s no reason to be tense,” he said. “As long as there is legitimate conflict, then you have enough tension to drive us through the story.
“We had to give the reader some sense of satisfaction,” he said.
The middle of a story enhances the stakes introduced in the beginning of a story and resolved in the ending, Wilmsen said.
“Middles of stories are about effectively managing that over and over again,” he said. “Things that characters have to figure out. As soon as one is done, another one picks up.
“It’s very difficult to write a story with just plain mounting tension,” he continued. “The middle is made of moments of triumph, obstacles that must be figured out.”
An audience member asked about including statistics and other data in a narrative story.
Wilmsen said journalists who have written a strong narrative can easily use figures in their story.
“If you give people a compelling enough story, they’re going to absorb all of that anyway,” he said. “The power of the story is in the telling.
“You’re going to get the message across much more effectively by giving the emotional experience,” he said. “Bring out the allure.”
Wilmsen sees potential in the art of narrative writing.
“We think of narrative writing in lots of different ways. One of the things is felt experience,” he said. “What does it feel like, taste like? We’re doing something explanatory that is both readable that people tend to be drawn to, and helps them imagine what it was like to be in that place.
“What we’ve been talking about here is a big subject,” he said. “People spend their lives studying this and working this out.”
Ten of the 25 journalists invited to take part in the Institute attended Wilmsen’s “Writing Workshop and Narrative Flow” Tuesday, Oct. 31, the final day of the three-day Institute. The Institute is presented by the New England First Amendment Coalition.
An audience member chips in to the discussion at the session on narrative writing.
‘We think of narrative writing in lots of different ways. One of the things is felt experience. What does it feel like, taste like? We’re doing something explanatory that is both readable that people tend to be drawn to, and helps them imagine what it was like to be in that place.’
— Steven Wilmsen
Woody Klein has retired as a news columnist for the Westport News after 50 years. Klein’s career began as a reporter for the Mount Vernon (N.Y.) Daily Argus. He then was a night police and general assignment reporter for The Washington Post for a year and a half before joining the New York World-Telegram & Sun, where he covered poverty, politics, housing and civil rights. From 1992 to 1997, beginning at age 63, Klein was the Westport News’ editor. He oversaw reporters who won many awards for their work. One piece, Behind Closed Doors, about abuse of women in their homes in Westport and Weston, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Klein wrote a 400-page book about the town’s history, titled “Westport Connecticut: The Story of a New England Town’s Rise to Prominence” and published in 2000. Klein has won numerous awards for his writing. His 10-part series, I Lived in a Slum, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1965. In 1964, Klein’s first book, “Let in the Sun,” was published. It told the story of his time as an undercover reporter in some of New York’s worst tenements. He wrote eight more books, with themes such as politics and poverty, while at the Westport News. After his time at the World-Telegram & Sun, Klein spent three years as then-New York Mayor John V. Lindsay’s press secretary. Klein later joined IBM, where he spent 24 years in communications for its manufacturing, development and marketing divisions. His last role at IBM was editor of Think magazine, the company’s international employee magazine distributed in more than 170 countries. Klein began his column, Out of the Woods, in the Westport News soon after he began working at IBM.
John Tabor is retiring as president and publisher of Seacoast Media Group, based in Portsmouth, after 40 years in newspapers. Seacoast publishes the Portsmouth Herald, Foster’s Daily Democrat of Dover, and weeklies in New Hampshire and Maine. It also is a commercial printer whose clients include the New Hampshire Union Leader of Manchester; The Sun of Lowell, Mass.; and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg, Mass. Seacoast provides digital marketing, direct mail and commercial delivery services too. After graduating from Yale University in 1977, Tabor interned at The Providence (R.I.) Journal. He then joined the copy desk at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and later became a police and court reporter for the Arizona Star of Tucson. After that, he bought a weekly for Mead Publishing of Lakeport, Calif., with a college friend. The paper increased its publication to five days a week before Tabor sold his share in the weekly to Mead. Tabor then published the Portsmouth Press with the former Ottaway Newspapers in 1987, initiating a newspaper rivalry with the Portsmouth Herald. An economic recession that began in 1991 resulted in the closing of the Portsmouth Press in 1993. Tabor briefly became general manager of the Pocono (Pa.) Record. In 1994, he was named publisher of Rockingham County Newspapers, including the Exeter News-Letter, the Hampton Union and the Rockingham News. In 1997, in a newspaper swap between the owners of Rockingham County Newspapers and the Portsmouth Herald resulted in the Herald merging with Rockingham County Newspapers, Seacoast Media’s first website, Seacoastonline.com, was launched that year. In 2001, Seacoast acquired the York (Maine) Weekly and York County Coast Star of Kennebunk, Maine
Melvin Stone
Richard E. Rappoli
William F. Dougherty
Frank Edward Keane
Derek C. Gentile 
Karlene Kelley Hale
Mildred Cole Péladeau
Anthony Randolph ‘Tony’ Jenkins
Christina Caturano
Robert J. Kmon Sr.
Jeff Otterbein has retired as sports editor of The Hartford Courant after 27 years. Dan Brechlin has been named to replace Otterbein as sports editor. Otterbein began in the Courant sports department in 1985 and has been sports editor since 1990. Otterbein has won the Associated Press Sports Editors Triple Crown for Top 10 daily section, Sunday section and special section four years in a row. Before his time at the C
ourant, Otterbein was assistant sports editor at the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Brechlin was previously the deputy metro editor for the Hartford Courant. Before joining the Courant, he was city editor for the Record-Journal of Meriden for six years. He was a reporter there until 2014 and then city editor from 2014 until 2016. He also has been a reporter for the Southington Citizen and the Plainville Citizen.
Members of the audience at Glen Johnson’s talk listen intently
We’re a big part of the fix for ‘junk news’
Gene Policinski
Inside the First Amendment
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. He can be reached at gpolicinski@newseum.org.
Follow him on Twitter:
@genefac
Let’s stop talking so much about “fake news.”
Not that we should ever cease identifying, talking about or countering misinformation, be it accidental error, the result of negligent work, or deliberately false — to which we must now add propaganda tactics aimed at destabilizing our democracy.
We face all those types of misinformation today; amplified as they are by platforms that allow for instantaneous, worldwide communication.
But the term “fake news” no longer has any real meaning as a national concern or a problem to be dealt with. The term has become far too politicized and much too imprecise, now serving as a catch-all for information anyone sees as divisive, disagreeable, biased or plain wrong. Instead, I prefer a term offered by my Newseum Education colleagues: “junk news.”
Regardless of what we call it, less talk and more action on misinformation is where our focus ought to be. Media Literacy Week, which took place Nov. 6 through 10, is as good a time to start as any.
NewseumED, the Newseum’s nonpartisan education arm, offered information and tools to help students — and all of us — navigate today’s complex media landscape. Its collections of resources are all aimed at helping us understand how news is made and how we can take a more active and responsible role in the information cycle. That includes having the skills to evaluate information, filter out fake news, separate facts and opinions, recognize bias, detect propaganda, spot errors in the news and take charge of our role as media consumers and contributors.
As junk news continues to infiltrate the newsfeeds of millions of social media users, education and awareness have become the best line of defense against the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Where journalists once served as the “gatekeepers” of society’s daily information consumption, today anyone with internet access can create and distribute content, and spread information by sharing it on social media.
For many people, that’s more comfortable and a better option: the power to choose and shape what we need to know, rather than having it fed to us by a select few. But with that power should come a greater sense of responsibility to draw our news from as many reliable, diverse sources as we can.
Failure to do that has created the now-infamous condition in which social media’s omnipresent algorithms track our every keystroke to present us with news that we “like” — or in other words, news that plays to our existing opinions and biases.
Sure, there was a time when readers would settle on a favorite TV network or, in an even earlier era, a favorite radio station for the nightly news. Newspaper readers in communities where there were multiple daily publications would subscribe to one over the others. Much of the non-local news, for good or bad, contained the same information — very often taken from wire services that prided themselves on their ability to “get it first, get it right — but above all, get it right, first.” Those were the days when CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite was called the “most trusted man” in the nation, by virtue of that news media mantle.
In today’s news world, where those long-standing print and broadcast news outlets are barely standing, and new media players have yet to show the depth or credibility it takes long to develop, we as consumers must take less on “faith” and more on “fact.”
For their part, news operations, think tanks, social media companies and others are working on ways to help consumers play a more responsible role in the daily news cycle. Verifying stories and tightening ethical standards are good starts, but significant obstacles lay in the path — namely, the declining revenue and resources of traditional press organizations, and the new Web-based media economy that depends on eyeballs and clicks. In such an environment, thorough “accountability” reporting — often dull but always necessary — has fallen by the wayside.
There are some signs that people are rethinking a reliance on just one site, which is a good first step to improving our news diet. According to the Pew Research Center, about a quarter of all U.S. adults (26 percent) get their news from two or more social media sites, up from 15 percent in 2013 and 18 percent in 2016. But consumers shouldn’t stop with just “more” — our daily intake needs to consist of varied, credible sources. Otherwise, consumers trap themselves in a news bubble or echo chamber, in which they only see information that confirms and reinforces their opinions instead of challenging them.
At a recent forum on First Amendment issues and fake news, I advanced a long-held theory of mine that eventually news consumers will demand information on which they can rely, and will over time migrate to those sources; that credibility will be the news currency of the 21st century
But it’s no longer the province of news providers alone to build that demand. Individual consumers must join in that effort by getting savvier about the news. In a twist on an old saying, “Let the buyer be aware.”