Talking Points Memo wants to hire a new reporter. In the job description, they require that applicants “must get how to build a story narrative, know TPM and our style of iterative reporting, and understand new media.” I’ve written before about TPM’s unique reporting approach, well-described in this GQ story from 2007:
“A key thing for us is people sending us articles in small publications that contain facts that have larger implications when seen in the framework of larger stories,” [TPM editor Josh] Marshall says. “So you end up with lots of chapters or vignettes of a story out there, but no one’s integrating them. Part of our niche is, we don’t have the slightest problem saying, ‘Hey, McClatchy’s got this great new scoop.’ And you take that scoop and see it in context of what the L.A. Times wrote last week and what the Arkansas Gazette wrote the week before and the original reporting we’ve been doing, and it all comes together. And that aggregation function, that pulling together of narratives, is a big part of what we do.”
Newspapers can’t do that, either; they have a finite amount of space, for which every story has to compete. “A reporter in San Diego could write a one-day story—Carol Lam got fired, yeah, it looks funny—but from an editor’s point of view, that reporter can’t come back the next day without a news peg,” Marshall says. “And we don’t need a news peg.” Web space, of course, is unlimited.
We can learn from several aspects of TPM’s approach. As well as their crowdsourcing and their “pulling together of narratives,” their independence from “news pegs” in developing a story is also an especially huge insight. It’s another reminder that on the Web, owning the story isn’t just (or even mostly) about getting all the scoops. It’s about owning the larger narrative.