They Love Everyday People   

Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page

By Michele Weldon

University of Missouri Press

280 pages; $39.95

Caught as we are in the swirl of change, it can be hard to distinguish the revolutionary from the faddish. "Everyman News" argues that a content revolution is taking place in plain sight that will transform media and could help save newspapers.

The revolution, writes Michele Weldon, is a "revived journalistic reverence for the individual" and "the concurrent explosion in marketing of the stories of ordinary people." She connects it to many other factors, among them reader tastes, citizen journalism, blogging, reality television and, crucially, "a post-9/11 reverence for the individual story."

Everyman news, Weldon says, reflects "a society leaning toward personal storytelling, away from a reliance on factoids and news bullets." It "has dethroned the celebrity infotainment madness..which dominated journalism in the '80s and early '90s... Celebrity-following has moved mostly online... Front pages are about real people."

To support this view, Weldon offers data from her analysis of the front pages of 20 newspapers in 2001 and 2004. This seems a short span for meaningful comparisons, but what she found does look like a trend: a higher percentage of front-page features in 2004 (50 percent compared with 35 percent), more narrative-style leads (43 percent to 32 percent) and greater use of "unofficial sources" (regular people instead of officials, measured by what seems an unnecessarily complex formula).

Weldon is an experienced feature writer and author who teaches journalism at Northwestern University. She also draws on anecdotal evidence to support her theme. She cites, for instance, days when every story on the Chicago Tribune's front page carries an anecdotal lead. Based on all this, she concludes, "Newspapers have become story papers."

Most relevant perhaps is Weldon's analysis of the 9/11 influence on journalism. She isn't the first to make this point, but her evidence certainly bolsters it. "So much of what ran in American newspapers" after September 11, she writes, "was closely related in tone and style to blogging and citizen journalism, but it was performed by professional journalists." Stories were told from citizens' points of view. Journalists themselves wrote in the first person. The result was "hard news with an everyman approach."

"An implied sensitivity to the dignity of the individual has prevailed since 2001," she writes. "The tone of the stories was more personal, emotional, and humanistic."

While she may not convince you that these changes are permanent, she does put a hopeful spin on the direction things seem to be headed.

Drawing on findings from Northwestern's Readership Institute and elsewhere, she argues that the "newspaper death watch focuses on the loss in circulation while ignoring the sporadic gains and the niche market still engaged in reading newspapers and still craving the brand of story newspapers deliver."

Some readers, she says, are returning to newspapers because they associate them with narrative approaches that are "becoming the newspaper's niche, the newspaper specialty."

Even if storytelling doesn't save newspapers themselves, she sees the trend as positive for journalism in general, and here is what she advises: "[F]reshen the product with everyman stories and allow the readership base to rise and move with you to another delivery base. The consistent delivery of this type of story will allow the story, rather than the paper, to define and become the brand."

At least at first glimpse, this all seems reasonable enough. But it does overlook some key concerns, especially about cause and effect. For example, during the span Weldon studies, as so-called everyman journalism has risen, newspaper circulation has fallen. So the evidence is at best mixed as to whether the new direction will pay off.

There's also the obvious problem with the term "everyman." Weldon takes care to explain that it reaches back to a late 15th-century morality play of the same name and "is intended as nonsexist." But it nevertheless is jarring and apt to strike many as backward-looking.

Considering Weldon's writing pedigree, the book has too many clunky sentences. Despite several nice references to my own work and that of AJR, she falters by referring to AJR contributor and former Managing Editor Chris Harvey incorrectly as "he."

Still, "Everyman News" adds constructive thinking, and a bit of hard evidence, to the conversation about the future of news. It further documents the decisive ongoing shift of power from producers to consumers.

Skyrocketing competition and profit demands are making the media increasingly solicitous of audience desires.

The hyper-interactive Internet allows unprecedented participation and access.

In such a climate, Weldon writes, "the cultural reverence for everyman narrative will continue as the demands of the audience grow louder... It is journalism that prompts engagement and involvement." And, it seems fair to add, hope.

Carl Sessions Stepp (cstepp@jmail.umd.edu), AJR's senior contributing editor, teaches at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.