In Praise of Scholarly Journalism

Put fiction to one side, and then ask, who are the best writers? Journalists or academics?

I think the answer is … we need a bit of both styles. Start with journalistic writing, too often looked down on by academics. Journalists are people who specialize in communicating complex ideas in a few lines. They are trained to extract the key points, put them into context - and enliven them with quotes. All of these are things any decent non-fiction writer will want to do too. But don’t give up on academics. They are often the originators of newspaper stories, patient researchers who not only sift through the primary sources but discover and in some cases even create them. They are people who will spend a year quite happily to produce one paragraph. You have to admire that.

Journalists, by contrast, churn stuff out. They work to deadlines and word lengths, producing ‘copy’ on the topic demanded, by the date specified. These are the skills that publishers rely on, long after the shine has come off professor-so-and-so’s earnest but foundering promise to be on the verge of finishing a ground-breaking, world-shattering study.

Which reminds me to look at the question the other way around: what are the weaknesses of the two tribes? Journalists have a habit of regurgitating the latest fashion, often at the expense of a deeper and wider perspective. Their books - like their columns in newspapers - seem to be for a particular moment, and then to rapidly lose relevance.

Scholarly works, by contrast, take the long view. Usually printed in small numbers in hardback mainly for libraries, they may sit quietly on the shelves for decades, and rarely aspire to become ‘classics’, even if hoping to be reference works.

So, which is better, to be the author of a standard reference work or of a bestseller? Trick question! Of course, a book should aim to be both. And such texts do emerge, very occasionally.

Take the first ten of Time Magazine’s list of the ‘Top 100’ non-fiction books - what might be called relatively ‘recent’ ones meaning published since 1923. And are their authors writing as professors - or as reporters?

Well, it seems more the latter. At No. 1 is Truman Capote. His book In Cold Blood tells the true story of the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959. It is written as if it were a novel, complete with dialog,  but Capote himself described the style as ‘New Journalism’. And even if Capote was not himself a journalist, he began as a copy boy at The New Yorker.

Number Two on the list however, does come from an academic: it is a book called The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. who was a professor of English at Cornell University. Mind you, it’s a pretty boring book, essentially about grammar and no self-respecting journalist would have wanted to write it.

A journalist is however the author of book No. 3, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings -  Maya Angelou’s Autobiography. Angelou had a spell as a journalist in n Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa.

No. 4, Fast Food Nation (subtitle: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal) comes from the pen of Eric Schlosser, who won awards for his  investigative journalism.

Book Number Five, also on food: is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. Sure enough, Pollan is a journalist writing for venerable outlets like the New Yorker, Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine, even if these days he also has a foot in academia - as a professor of journalism.

Sixth on the list however, is Maus, by Art Spiegelman. This is a special case, being a cartoon book, but has a journalistic feel, and indeed Spiegelman worked on magazines as well as later on becoming as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, which explains why the book as has something of the academic about it too.

At slot No. 7 is Stephen King’s book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. This appears to draw on nothing so much as his own experience of writing books. And it seems that he started writing while working in a laundry, so he fits neither the journalist nor the academic model.

Next in the list, Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, is however, much more the kind of book that illustrates the qualities of the best non-fiction writer. (Carson actually features in my current project which is about books and inspiration.) Carson was a pioneer whose writings are considered foundation tests of the whole global environmental movement. Crucial for her work was quasi-academic research in her first job, as  a marine biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, but within that role was a journalistic function: she was charged with summarizing the work of the Bureau in a form suitable for the general public. So Carson epitomizes the non-fiction writer who is both  a journalist and an academic researcher.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, is Time’s Number Nine, and the author in this case is unabashedly an academic: a specialist in the biophysics of membranes who is nowadays Professor of Geography at UCLA.

Completing the Top Ten, is John Hersey, who is considered a pioneer of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling devices are fused with reportage. His bestselling account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima has been called the finest piece of journalism of the 20th century. And he himself was one of the tribe: apprentice, and later  war correspondent at Time magazine.

All in all, if the Time survey is honest, journalists do seem to beat the academics when it comes to effective transmission of factual stories at book length. Maybe the journalists were biased towards their own, and maybe academics would compile a very different list.  But perhaps the real message is that both tribes can learn a trick or two from the other…

Martin Cohen is a full-time author specializing in explaining complex topics in a direct and lively way. His latest project, I Think Therefore I Eat: the Word’s Greatest Minds Tackle the Food Question, represented by literary agent Mark Gottlieb, is a book about food and why no one—governments, doctors or even celebrities—really seem to know even the truth about it.