One Day at a Time

It occurred to me only in reading the post of 8.13.09 that "journalism," etymologically, is a daily practice. Stephanie writes, "I wonder whether it is possible to practice journalism that is not so much about hunting down stories as about knowing a place and community and cultural reality deeply, so that one can speak intelligently and even wisely about it even if nothing ‘news-worthy’ is happening there." I am inclined to reply, "Yes! Journalism can be precisely itself by knowing and noting the daily life of a people or a place. Journalism isn’t the same as news, and it can go on productively (fruitfully? more on that another time) when there is no news at all.”

But this reply is too simple, or maybe just wrong. It seems to me that “journalism,” used colloquially, includes all of the following: the news, what we call features, human interest, exposé, and opinion. There are probably other subgenres I’m not thinking of. If this is right, then my idea that journalism can be “precisely itself” looks misleading and absurd. At the same time, I think I’ve stumbled on one of the valuable features of the journal, which of course has the same etymology.

For all the difficulty I have defining journalism, it still seems opposed to the journal in one clear way. While the news elements of journalism can operate on the very limited time scale of the day, as in “day after day” – while they should consist primarily of reportage – the other kinds of journalism I’ve mentioned all strive to build coherent and compelling narratives from events that follow one after another without, in fact, being part of a story. It is the news that resembles the journal, while the other forms of journalism represent the powerful human impulse to impose a story pattern (beginning, middle, and end, say) on unpatterned, unauthored occurences. Journals can be compelling because when we reread them, they force us out of the narratives we’ve constructed. They drop us back into what I’ll call the diurnal mode. They call our attention to the facts of a day, and simultaneously they remind us of the fact that we’ve incorporated those facts, fictionally, into a story of a life.

To return to Stephanie's question: we can practice journalism both by hunting down stories that other people have already shaped or rough-hewn, or we can rely on our own immersion in a place, community, or cultural-reality – and write stories that are therefore more totally our own. They may be wiser, but they also may be no more true.