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 Gina Barton  Tim Harmon

Behind every headline
lurks a real story

By Jim Killam
NINA Communications Coordinator

How many times have we glossed over those headlines? Two die in high-speed crash … Shooting case still unsolved … High-school musical opens this weekend.

Behind each of those headlines, each of those routine news reports, lurks a story. Some are every bit as riveting as the best movies or novels. They just need a creative reporter to tell them.

Gina Barton of the Indianapolis Star and Tim Harmon of the South Bend Tribune know a thing or two about telling great stories. On April 27, they spoke to about 40 reporters, editors and educators at NIU about the serial narrative form of news writing. Barton and Harmon collaborated at South Bend as reporter and editor, respectively, on Barton's acclaimed 1999 serial narrative, "Justice for Becky." The 19-part series, which can be read online, recounted efforts to solve the mystery of what happened to a missing 15-year-old girl.

The story wasn't new, nor was it unresolved. Back in 1993, it had made headlines for months. But there was an incredible story behind those headlines and straight-news articles that hadn't been fully told.

"When you tuck your kids into bed at night," Barton told the audience, "they don't say, 'Tell me an article.'"

So, Barton set about telling readers a story: one with heroes, villains, tense dialogue, unexpected plot twists and cliffhanger endings. There were 19 chapters - none longer than 35 column inches and most closer to 20.

"We read these things in novels, we see them on television," Harmon said. "Why not put them in newspapers?"

"I got into journalism because I thought I might want to be a fiction writer or a poet," Barton said. "I ended up becoming a reporter, but there was still a side of me that was dying to be creative."

Early in the presentation, as Harmon fielded a question about how to incorporate narrative writing into everyday work, Barton penned a mantra on the dry-erase board behind them: "Death to the inverted pyramid."

That doesn't mean abandoning journalistic ethics. Quite the contrary. For "Becky," Barton painstakingly confirmed every detail -- including quotes -- with two or more sources, including court records and eyewitnesses. No detail from any scene was manufactured. Which isn't to say, obviously, that she reported and attributed the life and energy out of what she found.

"You can be fair and tell the story without having to be objective in the way that we traditionally think of objective," Barton said. "It's OK if your readers feel the same thing you did when they read it."

Try this at home

The No. 1 factor in deciding whether to tackle a serial narrative, Harmon said, is that the idea has to be interesting. Mysteries work. So do health and medical stories. Sometimes, as with "Justice for Becky," the news already has happened and the reporter reconstructs it. Other times, as with a story about surgery, the reporter can watch the news unfold.

Next comes getting management to commit to the time and the resources. Especially at smaller newspapers, Barton said, it's easier to sell a narrative project in many 15- to 20-inch pieces rather than four much longer segments. "Justice for Becky" was marketed as a series of installments readers could digest over a quick cup of coffee.

Before committing yourself and your newspaper, get all of your sources on board, Barton advised. Tell them how much time it's likely to take, and how personal it's going to be. Nothing that ends up in print should come as an unpleasant surprise to a key source. And, realize up front that you might have to abort the project if one of those key sources backs out.

A serial narrative succeeds or fails on a question readers are dying to have answered. What happened to Becky? Who shot J.R.? Will Dorothy ever get home to Kansas? The story should unfold over time, rather than being pinned on one momentary event. It needs a least one likeable character - someone readers can relate to.

And, Barton emphasized, there needs to be something beneath the surface. The characters need to grow between the first and last installments.

Lest anyone think the serial narrative only works on the "human misery" beat, Ken Fuson of the Baltimore Sun used the technique to take readers from auditions to final performance of a high-school production of "West Side Story." View the series.

For a large list of links to ground-breaking serial narratives - including work by Gina Barton, Tom French of the St. Petersburg Times and Tom Hallman Jr. of The Oregonian - visit "The Narrative Newspaper" site.


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