What do journalists mean when we say we are “making meaning” through our work? In short-form news pieces, a journalist’s job is often simply: let people know what happened. People will “make meaning” of the news, or they won’t. Our job is simply to provide them the information they need to do so. But we see long-form differently. We’re not just telling people what happened, we’re telling people a story. That story has an order, which tends to reflect the meaning that the writer has made from all of the information they have collected in their research. In the final product of a long-form piece, the reader doesn’t get all the information – that would be impossible, especially if, as Chip Scanlan puts it, that journalist sets out to “find out everything they can” at the beginning of their reporting. But what does it actually mean to “make meaning”? Can meaning be made?
Putting together this week’s reading, and last week’s, I think what people mean when they say “make meaning” is actually “make structure.” Scanlan describes Song Yang’s death as “the byproduct of a wretched, Dickensian system.” Part of the structure – ergo meaning – of this piece is that Song Yang’s death is not just a fluke, but part of a larger system. She is a window into a world few have seen. As Barry tells Scanlan in the annotated copy, there is no precise nut graf in the story, but its “reason for being” (the best way I have heard a nut graf described) is delivered in his 12th graf “A tenth of a mile… and few in this city will take notice.” This reminded me of the “reason for being” of Senior’s assessment of why Bobby Mcilvaine’s story mattered; that in the aftermath of 9/11, we all understand the event as a whole, but our knowledge of individual stories are limited. In these cases, Barry and Senior make meaning in a very direct way: they tell us what the meaning is.
Robert Worth accomplishes something similar in “Aleppo After the Fall,” rolling lede and nut graf into a neat narrative. In his story, we don’t quite need a directly stated “reason for being” as we might in “The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail.” It is clear that this story is tied to Bashar al-Assad’s fall, an obviously significant event. We get more contextual descriptions in graf 8 and 9, but never does Worth exactly state a reason for being.
There are also subtler ways of assigning meaning through structure: symbols, motifs, and recurring metaphors as one might find in a book. Song Yang’s butterflies particularly stood out to me. The image of the young girl showing iridescent pressed butterfly wings to her friends at sleepovers tied with the butterfly-adorned headband which flies off her head in her fall infuses the structure with meaning. The detail is not meaningful because it is representative of a larger system, but rather because it is unique to Song Yang – an image around which we can order her life.
The last form of meaning-making that stood out to me comes not through structure but rather journalistic access. Whether it’s access to a place like 40th Street or access to a place like meetings regarding Ukraine in the oval office, as we get in Isabelle Khurshudyan’s piece, the settings of these pieces take on meaning because we could not get to them without the journalist’s help. Ultimately, I’m not sure journalists actually do make meaning. It’s a small and probably insignificant difference, but I think they find it where it already is, structure it, and deliver it. Part of this delivery also comes through being attentive to a reader’s likely frame of reference, as McPhee describes it. Attending to structure, frames of reference, and what we are giving our readers access to that they didn’t already have is how we illuminate meaning for our readers. Knowing that we are doing so is how we make meaning of our work to ourselves.
