Psst, Nieman Journalism Lab: Explanatory journalism isn't "the new craze of the past year."

It’s not just a new craze, people, it’s a movement!

It’s Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, and Vox, and The Upshot at The New York Times, and now–a new entrant–Storyline at The Washington Post.

“Explanatory journalism,” writes media analyst Ken Doctor at Nieman Journalism Lab, is “the new craze of the past year, built on ideas as old as good journalism itself. Or call it the wonk wars…How do we explain this movement?”

Doctor’s post–mostly an interview with David Leonhardt, who runs The Upshot–says the “craze” arose from the explosion of data and the more conversational tone of the Internet, and attributes those assertions to Leonhardt. Neither point is substantiated in the post.

What’s missing? That’s right–science, environment, and medical reporters have been handling data for decades, developing great expertise and often doing a superb job of extracting important data points and explaining the implications to the public. Leonhardt acknowledges that some reporters “have been doing this work for a long time,” and he cites four business and financial reporters.

Is Washington’s world view so narrow that politics and business are the only things they read, or are aware of? How could Doctor write a post like this and ignore science writers? In the comments, I asked him, and we had this exchange:

Paul Raeburn • 3 days ago

Ken,
By writing only about business and political journalism, you’ve overlooked a huge and important kind of explanatory journalism–the kind that medical and science journalists do every day.

We were handling data long before there was an Internet–and we’re doing so now. We know how to do this. I’m glad to see that Nate Silver has a science vertical, but he hasn’t done a very good job with it, perhaps because many of the stories are written by a University of Chicago economist. (One example: http://ksj.mit.edu/tracker-archive/nate-silvers-fivethirtyeight-stumbles-ag/).

But you can find excellent science and medical reporting not only at The New York Times, but also on many websites. We don’t make a big deal about how we’re on the cutting edge, data-based reporting, because we were doing it long before David Leonhardt and Nate Silver showed up to proclaim a revolution.

Ken Doctor 3 days ago

Paul: Absolutely right, and short-sighted of me not to include medical and science particularly. Are you pointing to those journalists’ work in the Times and other newspapers, and/or on other sites, legacy/start-up/other as well?

Paul Raeburn 2 days ago

All of the above, I think, Ken. Certainly science and medical writers were handling data in the legacy media, and they have continued in online media and startups, too. Unfortunately, it’s apparent that the opportunities for science and medical writing have increased online much more quickly than we’ve been able to train journalists to handle those opportunities. “Breakthrough”–a word most science and medical writers learn never to use–has become alarmingly common on the web. It’s a shame Nate Silver didn’t hire an experienced science writer for his site; he’s paying the price now (in bad stories), although I’m not sure he knows it.

That was the end of the exchange. One subsequent commenter pointed to a series at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on invasive species. None of the others seemed able to step outside of the world view in which politics and business are the only important news stories.

Let’s remind Doctor and Nieman Journalism Lab that the wonk wars have been going on for a long time. Science writers invented them.

-Paul Raeburn

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