It Is No Coincidence - How the Loss of Aspiring Novelists Has Undermined the Power and Purpose of the Daily Newspaper

Once upon a time, the first draft of history - our newspaper articles that let us know each day about what was happening - was written by aspiring novelists. Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Gabriel García Márquez, George Orwell, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe were a few of the reporters who became famous novelists but the newsroom was full of journalists who aspired to be like them. A story rich with characters and taking its time to unfold was the standard. A world that would - after suspense and confusion - eventually make sense lay behind the daily reports.

One of the reasons that the world feels more chaotic now is that the folks reporting it to us don't understand fiction, don't understand stories. There's always been chaos. News - to make any sense at all - has to construct a narrative. The aspiring novelist - who saw daily events as part of a bigger narrative - were better at that important task.

It's no coincidence that steam-powered presses made daily newspapers popular in the mid-1800s, about the same time that the nation-state emerged. Newspapers gave communities a common narrative, a shared set of interests and issues. They were the source of the ideas from which nation-states were debated and built.
It's no coincidence that we're increasingly divided as newspapers drift into obsolescence and we lose the narrative glue that binds together imagined communities like nation-states.

And it's no coincidence that coincidence is not enough to hold our attention or hold us together. For that you need a story.