This week’s focus on structure reminded me of Joshua Yaffa’s comments on the difference between top-down and bottom-up reporting. The pieces this week show us that we might think about the two styles of reporting as applicable to styles of structure in the resulting piece. Colloff’s piece on Skalnik follows a structure that makes it seem like it is a bottom-up story: through Skalnik’s exploits, we can get a glimpse of the broader problem of snitches in court trials. We spend virtually the entire story with Skalnik, the victims he prays upon, and the way that judges respond to his statements in court. I’m a little astounded at the sheer number of twists and turns in his life, and he seems like the perfect character for the story. Only in a couple of paragraphs and one or two sections do we read about how Skalnik is emblematic of a broader problem in the criminal legal system. In this sense, I would argue that it is a bottom-up story: the story stays close to him, and only occasionally zooms out. Whether or not the reporting process turned out to be bottom-up or top-down could go either way (to Colloff’s credit, I think, because it makes her storytelling feel more organic): the fact that Skalnik was mainly active in the 20th century, and the piece was written in 2019, suggests that Colloff may have been looking for a story to narrate the issue of snitching in courts, but on the other hand, the Dailey case’s recent developments may have prompted her to look into the longer backstory. In the end, I posit that the former seems more likely, as the moments where Colloff zooms out are backed up by relatively less extensive reporting.
By contrast, Schulz’s piece on The Really Big One is structured in a very top-down way: the piece is about an earthquake, and characters slot in every now and then between hand-based demonstrations of how subduction zones work or extremely vivid descriptions of the catastrophe that would ensue if an earthquake emerged from the Cascadia zone. They are merely one way of dramatizing the geologic story Schulz wants to tell. I suppose this makes sense: if your main “character” is an earthquake, it’s a little hard to ask it about its life.
The McPhee and Stewart pieces on structure seemed suited for the formats they were written for. McPhee jumps in and out of chronology, weaving in flashbacks and fast-forwards at every opportunity, though following a generally chronological pathway. By contrast, Stewart cautions against too many shifts in point of view or time period, presumably because the type of audio journalism he was writing for had less time to tell a story (in, say, a “This American Life” duration). A documentary like In the Dark shows you can get away with a lot more temporal flexibility with longform reporting, similar to McPhee’s work. I generally side with a more McPhee-style approach given my preference for longform reporting, but I see how Stewart’s piece may be useful when writing shorter-from content. Though when comparing the two styles of piece I much preferred Stewart’s, due to his mostly direct, informative approach. In this case, the information within McPhee’s showing and telling—his somewhat sprawling, narrative account—didn’t seem to warrant the length of the piece as a whole. Although perhaps that’s because I’m a Zoomer with no attention span.
