NO AUTEURS IN JOURNALISM
Be honest, what’s your conception of a writer? When you picture a writer, of any kind, what do you see in your head? I’d bet it’s a lone gun type, holding a glass of whiskey in one hand while, in the other, there’s a cigarette with a dangerously long ashy tip. Am I close? If so, you (I, we, all of us!) need to rethink your conceptions of who a writer is and what they do. Especially in the journalistic realm.
I’ve written across a wide range of disciplines. In fact, I’ve never had a paid job that wasn’t to do with writing in some form or another. With the one exception of the time I worked at Next for two days and resolutely wasn’t asked back for a third.
I’ve written plays, short films, sitcom scripts, video game scripts, technical documents describing the minutiae of European cosmetics and medical device regulations and directives, Christmas promotional trailers for African oil and gas companies, corporate pitches, and more marketing and PR copy than I can in good conscience list on a page and expect you to continue reading past.
I don’t say this to brag. In fact, as a general rule, ‘I’ statements when talking about one’s achievements or experience tend to make me cringe.
The point I’m trying to make is that I’ve learned how to write to reasonable effect across a range of formats and mediums. The downside of that is, I struggle in finding a balance in which skills from one discipline to bring to another and which should be left firmly where they belong.
An obvious example of that is in creative or personal writing versus newswriting. In creative writing or personal essays, you want to be emotive. You want to be emotive in newswriting too, sure, but in a different way.
In a piece of prose, for example, you assume creative control over a character’s thoughts and feelings. You use the language of metaphor to create a feeling or communicate a message to the reader. It seems obvious to say, but there’s very little room for metaphor in your run-of-the-mill court report, and even less to assume creative control of a subject’s mindset.
Both of those are examples we could all come up with. And there are plenty of other obvious ones like them. But it’s the less obvious ones that make moving from one writing discipline to another a lot more cumbersome to negotiate.
One less obvious example that I’m learning more and more about this week, and one that runs counterintuitive to the cliché of the lone wolf writer, is this: there is no auteurship in journalism.
Not only is there no auteurship in journalism, there’s no room for auteurship in journalism. And that’s a good thing.
Collaborative spaces and auteurship.
First, let’s clear up our definition of the word ‘auteurship’. We get the word by way of its associated noun, ‘auteur’, via the French language. In French, the word simply means ‘author’. In common parlance, it’s come to mean a little more than that.
Today, ‘auteur’ is most commonly used to refer to a creator (usually a writer or filmmaker) who exerts a lot of creative control and oversight over the products they create. You’d call Quentin Tarantino an auteur. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, of South Park and Book of Mormon fame, are auteurs. Greta Gerwig, Lin Manuel Miranda, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Martin McDonagh, Alfred Hitchcock, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, these are all auteurs.
Effectively, an auteur is someone who conceives of, produces, and completes their own artistic visions in a relative vacuum or with an extremely high degree of ownership.
This, of course, runs counter to the spirit of open collective collaboration. By the very definition of its individualistic nature, auteurship is bound more towards subjectivity than the kinds of objectivity one may more easily find in a group dynamic.
Are you starting to see why this mode of creativity might not play well in the world of journalism? Let me share a small anecdote with you to help push the point home.
Let bylines be bylines.
This week I had my first shared byline. It was a bittersweet experience. Not because I had to share credit (in fact, I got top billing on the byline), but because I felt I got too much credit in comparison to the other writer on the story.
Without dredging too far into the weeds, the other writer (a kind and talented reporter that I’m happy to have met) and I were working on similar topics. Both to do with the same housing crisis story, but both coming from different angles.
It was decided by the publication’s editors that, to put out a piece with a more 360-degree scope, both of the individual pieces we were working on should be combined. We both agreed that was the smarter approach and that was fine.
However, I soon came to see that the other writer had put a lot more groundwork in than I had. I had reached out to institutions for comments to varying degrees of success, but she had gone out into the field, interviewed people, and already completed a working draft of the story she wanted to tell. Up to that point, she had ‘auteured’ (not a word, don’t look it up) her piece into being.
What did I contribute? A quote from an institution and a rewrite of the other writer’s piece that unified both of our angles on the same story.
Now. From what we’ve discussed on auteur theory above, how appropriate of a process is that for a creative person trying to tell a story they have in their mind? Was it fair to the other writer that I did that, and then proceeded to get top billing on the story?
The answer is that auteurship, in this case, is entirely irrelevant. Auteurship is a trait that just doesn’t work in journalism – unless you’re Hunter S Thompson, and my internal organs can’t handle being Hunter S Thompson.
Balance comes most often from a collective.
Auteurship, through the definition that I’ve outlined above, simply can’t work in news journalism because that’s just not how news works. News, unlike the writing of a fiction or the cinematography of a film, cannot happen in a vacuum. Unless you’re writing a report about Dyson maybe.
Time constraints exist. Deadlines loom. One person’s strength in hitting the streets and working their charm in a vox pop may be another person’s weakness. Others are experts in pouring over heady documents and finding the one fact or piece of data that nobody else could see – if you pay close attention to revelations coming from the Pandora Papers this week, you’ll be able to see real life examples of those kinds of experts in action.
News isn’t an auteur’s angle on a story. It’s, at its best, a balanced review of an objective truth. Finding that balance can take a whole newsroom. And perhaps it’s best when it does.
In a newsroom scenario, the kinds of collaborations in my housing story anecdote happen all the time. They are natural and necessary.
Though perhaps it was a kindness on part of the editors and other writer that I got the byline billing, considering it was my first piece for the publication in question.
Handing over creative control.
The above is a valuable lesson that I’m learning in the context of what attributes from other writing disciplines to bring, or not to bring, to journalism.
In creative mediums, I’m used to exerting a large degree of control over projects. I have never written a play that I haven’t directed, for example. In previous professional spaces, I’m used to taking the lead as a project manager and directing the flow of creativity and processes. As a stereotypical ‘Type A’ person, I tend to have a strong view on how I think things should work.
The challenge I‘m hoping to navigate my way around on my current journey is to not let those traits, that are advantages in other spaces, crowd the plate in this journalistic space where they are (at present) counterproductive.
So far in my journey, I have learned this: in creative fiction, great stories often come from individuals; in journalism, great news is crowdsourced.