What makes a story great? What makes it memorable? At the NewsLab conference “Reinventing TV News,” we asked those questions of master storytellers–people who tell stories in different ways and in different media. What was striking was how much they agreed on the essential elements of superb storytelling.
A great story, they said, is not predictable although its central truth is often familiar. A great story surprises. It teaches. It hooks the audience, sometimes with an image or a metaphor. It connects. A great television news story can do all this, too, but often TV news falls short. Consider how you might apply some of these essential elements in your next story or newscast.
Surprise
JOHN LARSON: West Coast Correspondent, Dateline NBC. Before joining NBC News, John was a general assignment reporter at KOMO-TV in Seattle.
At Dateline we call it a reveal, but on a more elemental level it’s the ability to surprise people, and to surprise them in a meaningful way. Not just shock them, or stun them, but allow the energy of surprise to bring along with it elements of truth….One thing I notice about really good stories is they lead you to the truth. They don’t tell you the truth. They bring you up to the point where you can appreciate the truth, and then they release it. And it runs out into the field all by itself and people listening to it, hear it and sense it and own it. Whereas, reports do just the opposite. They lead with the truth. And frequently a reader or a listener isn’t in a position to care much about that truth.
DOUG MARLETTE: Pulitzer-Prize winning editorial cartoonist. He also draws the comic strip “Kudzu” and wrote the musical of the same name.
The problems that you have in news is the problem that we have in political cartoons — why are so many cartoons boring? Why do they lose you? Why are you never surprised? [It’s because the writer is] telling not showing, lecturing, didacticism, being “on the nose,” as we say in theater…”On the nose” is when you tell what people already know. And it’s guaranteed boredom. This happens a lot in TV news, I’ve noticed, if you’re telling them what they’re seeing….One of the things you have to do in musicals is if you have somebody in a situation and then you say it again in a song, they’re just, people are zzzzzzz. What you want to do is engage the imagination. You want to get people involved, to enter that world.
CANDY ALTMAN: Corporate news executive with Hearst-Argyle Broadcasting, former news director, WCVB, Boston
The shared element here though, what you’re saying about musicals is they are transporting you somewhere, taking you someplace that you can’t go yourself. Letting you in to someone’s character. Letting you into a private moment, to a poignant event, somewhere that you can’t travel on your own. I think when we do it well, that’s what television can do best, is take viewers on a journey. And that’s what a good play does, that’s what a great movie does, that’s what a great book does. It just takes you.
Relevance
TOM ROSENSTIEL: Designed the Project for Excellence in Journalism and directs its operations
How many times have you read stories or watched stories on TV where the reporter is pushing some emotion or some prose and you’re thinking, “There’s nothing here.” And you start skimming down to get to a fact because there’s no information there and there’s no compelling character. It’s reaching for devices, emotion, a phony character they don’t really care about…And the trick is how do you make these characters real and meaningful. It’s detail and things like that, but when you’re dealing with news it’s got to be information that we need to know, that we want to know.
JOHN LARSON:
When you get to the facts, or you get to the real information, one thing I always look for is, when we get there, how much do I appreciate it? If it’s a story about a bureaucracy or an entanglement or a bill that’s stuck in committee forever, when you finally learn that, how much does that mean to me? And usually, that’s my own judge of whether a story has been told well or not…You can’t bury your information too far down, but you have to be sure that whoever is reading it will appreciate it when it arrives.
Connections
DAVID TURECAMO: Reporter and producer for ABC News Nightline. David is a photojournalist pioneering the use of small, digital video cameras for first-person reporting.
The stories that I find myself drawn to recently are Wall Street and the fire arms industry, and the thing that fascinates me about both of them is just, “Wow, these are the people who are doing all this sh**.” It’s like, whoa, how do you talk about guns? And how do you feel about what you’re doing? And let me see a factory and who are the people that work in these places? Wow! They have soda machines! They actually drink coffee and take breaks and… I found myself when I first went to Colt shooting the lunchroom because it just seemed–here I come from this world of just reading about the fire arms industry and what demons these people are and I enter and I realize, “They eat lunch” you know.
JOHN LARSON:
You know we really do take people into these foreign worlds. And we really do think that all we have to do is bring them to a new world and their curiosity will draw them into it. What I’ve found is, that’s not true. Completely foreign worlds people avoid. But it’s the things that they really recognize inside those worlds that draw them into it. It’s the fact that they’re reading their newspaper on their break, drinking Pepsi. Because then you realize… these are people just like me making these guns, and then all of a sudden the world becomes accessible… So, it’s sort of like the commonalities. On a cellular level, we like get it. You know. That’s what draws us, makes us curious about things we don’t really know yet. And we learn and participate.
GEORGE TEREN: Professional singer and songwriter; George has won numerous honors and awards including a Clio, a Mobius, and a number of Tellys and Emmys.
I had a song out about a year ago that was a hit for Billy Ray Cyrus, a country artist, and it was called “Busy Man,” and it was similar in theme to the Harry Chapin song “The Cat’s in the Cradle” and it was just about the conflict a guy goes through balancing home and job and all of that. Billy Ray told me that he never had a song where so many people came up and talked to him about it and it was just because it was “relate-able.” And it was actually one of his biggest hits. I think that’s what’s at the bottom of it all, just coming up with something that is honest.
DAN ROSENHEIM: News director, KPIX-TV in San Francisco, Calif.; Dan worked in print journalism before becoming news director of KRON-TV.
The first word that came to my mind when I thought about good stories was page-turner. I think that’s the idea that everyone is expressing in wanting to know what’s coming next and not knowing what’s coming next; the element of surprise and uncertainty. But that said, I think its worth noting that there is also joy in familiarity. We have instant replays. How many times have people of a certain generation seen Lee Harvey Oswald get shot, yet we look again and again and again? And there are books that you go to — I mean, there was a period in my life where I read mystery stories, which is the quintessential book that you wouldn’t read if you knew what the end was, but I’d go back to the same Dorothy L. Sayer story…you know three or 4 or 5 times because I loved the stories. They produced emotions in me, whether it was the characters or the writing or the cadence or whatever, they made me feel good, even though I knew who did it at the end.
Hooks
GEORGE TEREN:
There’s two different kinds of hooks. One is a melodic hook…something that is so catchy, it’s that little melodic phrase that drives you crazy so that you can’t get it out of your head. As for a lyrical hook…it’s repetition. It’s taking one phrase and illustrating it in several different ways… Having some sort of twist. Stating one thing and then somewhere later twisting the whole thing with the same phrase. It’s the identifying moment in the song.
ROBERT KRULWICH:
You don’t want a song that…doesn’t have gravity, but you also want a song that sticks in your head. Well, news reporters more than anything in the world want something to stick in your head. The really good ones, reporters, figure out how to distill the set of images that they have so that one or two of them hit very very strongly and last…Or if you’re not doing a visual story, I do a lot of abstract stories, you have to find a metaphor that people will remember. It’s like a hook in the sense of a hook where you hang your coat… I need to have the hook, I have to find the hook that people will remember, otherwise it goes right through. I find that thinking musically, thinking with the strategy of a songwriter.
DOUG MARLETTE:
What I was interested in political cartoons were those kinds of cartoons, the ones that are up from the depths, that are these powerful metaphors and images that stay with you, that you can’t forget. And then I started realizing over the years, it’s the same thing with novels. What’s the difference with a show that you go to see and have forgotten by the time you go to hail a cab and one that gets inside you, in your bloodstream? And it has something to do with these hooks, the metaphors, these images that are powerful in meaning and that is way deep and different from the intellectual constructs… What’s the difference between the million mystery novels that you’ve read — and I love mystery novels, but it’s kind of formulaic — and it’s the same thing with cartoons — there are formulas. But the things that transcend that and hit on something more basic, that’s the thing you remember.
BOYD HUPPERT:
Sometimes the greatest hooks are in the minor details. I heard about the immigration officials’ interview with Elian’s father. The father knew his shoe size. That just blew me away. I used it in the story I did last night and when I got home that’s the first thing my wife said. She said “I saw your story and you put a whole new light on that man because he knew his son’s shoe size.” It was interesting because it connected with me and it connected with my wife and I know it connected with a lot of other people.
People
NAMU LWANGA: Award-winning storyteller and singer; Namu was born, bred and educated in Uganda. She sings in over nine different traditional languages.
I like the idea…that you really dwell more on not just the facts, the facts, the facts, but the people — humanizing the people, because that’s what storytelling is about. Bringing to life something that was inanimate. For example I’ve been watching the Elian Gonzalez case, and I kept sitting there going “Somebody’s going to do something different.” And from a storyteller’s perspective, I was just looking at the two faces of the father and the son being so similar. And the story is right there. It’s about the creases in the old man’s face and the creases in the brows of the little boy’s face. The culture shock, just the culture shock — I’m from Uganda, so I know — just the culture shock of these two people, one very very young face and one really older face tells everything. It tells the past, the present, the future. That’s where I would begin. Then, with these two faces, right in the middle is the missing face of the mother. And those three, I would look at it like a fabric. Now, this fabric is being torn apart. Now within this tearing fabric you get a sea of characters who just come in and from a storyteller’s perspective that’s where I would begin the story.
KIMBERLY MERCADO: Producer of Our Stories at Oxygen Media. She has a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from New York University and has lived and worked in Miami, Puerto Rico and Brazil.
You know, I’m sitting in the movies and if I can relate to one character in that movie, then I’m going to totally get into it. But, if not, I’ll just sort of fade away. It’ll still be an okay story but I won’t necessarily remember it for a long time. So, I always [look for] things like the everyday girl or the everyday person, the everyday elements. Those are the ones that at least in my project, I find have been very successful. And the thing is, our stories are coming from our community, so they ARE everyday experiences, so I’ve found that that to me is very very important.
Courage
ROBERT KRULWICH:
Martin Scorsese said this once, that it’s sort of like arranging flowers. You know the flowers but these flowers in this arrangement seem to tell you, speak to you what the arrangement is. You have to listen very very closely until it just seems right. And still, it’s a guess…Which is what a reporter does, you walk into a situation and you try to find the structure in it that will reveal itself to you. But…the structure that reveals itself to you whispers, and not always very clearly. You have to listen as hard as you can. And the frightening part of doing this for a living is that sometimes you can’t hear it. And you get very nervous. Oh my god, I’ve spent all this money, and I’ve been in situations where I’ve had producers and all come to a place and set up the lights and they’ve done their jobs and nothing is happening. And then all eyes turn to you. What the f**k are you doing?…It puts them in danger. It’s an actually palpable danger, the cameraman, the producer, the associate producer, the young people who are thrown into a situation which is novel and the novelness is deeply insecure. I’ve had camera crews walk away from me and go back to the building instead of continue the shoot because of something that I did. And you have to believe that it will come out all right. And you have to be prepared for it not to. Hold your ground.
