Tyler Cowen: observation

Transcript context

…Exactly. So the lede of our obit — we say, “Fred W. McDarrah, a self-described square who was a longtime photographer for the Village Voice documented the unwashed exploits of the Beat generation, and as an enterprising freelance talent agent rented out members of that generation (washed or unwashed) to wide-eyed suburban society gatherings, died,” etc., etc. So that was great fun. One thing I find interesting when I read obituaries is how much subtle humor is in them and how much of an attempt is made to make the first sentence be especially interesting. And often the last sentence contains a kind of nugget or surprise or twist on the story. Now, the other parts of the newspaper typically aren’t like this, be it the New York Times or elsewhere. So why do obituaries have this special status where there’s room in them for this kind of humor and invention? Or alternatively, why don’t more parts of the newspaper actually copy this if it works, which I think it typically does? As to what more parts of the newspaper do or don’t do, I can’t speak, but of course, as you know, there are very ironclad conventions for the structure of news articles. Historically, obits were no exception to that. These conventions actually have been in place during the Civil War. And it’s worth digressing about them quickly because they’re quite fascinating. Anyone who’s ever taken Journalism 101 has heard about the inverted pyramid, which is this upside-down triangle that’s supposed to be the model for the lede paragraph of any news story and in fact for the structure of the news story as it flows along: broad-based information first and then finer- and finer- and finer-grained detail, down to stuff at the end that you could possibly dispense with if you’re short on space. And that model is an information-processing model. It has endured for over a hundred years because it’s cognitively perfect. It came about during Civil War battle coverage, when they had the medium of telegraphy for the first time available to reporters. Like much new technology, it was bulky. Lines went down. And reporters learned in a do-or-die sort of way, “Get the broadest information through first, so if the lines go down, at least your readers back in Boston or Baltimore will have something. Your editor will have something to put in the paper.” That model has endured because it’s how we process information. It’s cognitively perfect. Obits, too, were beholden to that model, plus weighed down further by all of this boilerplate that has to be there — so-and-so died, when, where, of what illness, at what age. And that is why historically obits were considered one of the most boring sections of any daily paper. Happily, in the last 20 or 30 years, particularly we at the Times have realized that underlying all of that potentially very leaden boilerplate is a pure narrative arc. Because what does an obit do? It’s charged with taking subjects from the cradle — John Doe was born on January 1st, 1900 — to the grave — John Doe died yesterday. That gives you a built-in narrative arc. And indeed, obits turn out to be the most purely narrative genre in any daily paper. The reason we have these great ledes and we hope great kickers, as we call them, at the end is that we are exploiting very happily this inherent narrative potential that is a news obit.…

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