From the Fiction Desk

More and more everyday I grow dismayed at how little of a gap exists between the modern American journalist and the modern American “fictionalist”. Do you watch the news? Do you watch your own local news? Are you happy with what you see? There might be a reason why you are not.

As a “fictionalist”, I weave my stories to contain elements of the news of the time to ground it in to a sense of realism. Regardless if the stories I blend in to the background is fictional or ripped from the headlines, they serve the purpose of entertainment—adding drama or sometimes ironic and sarcastic humor to counterpoint the fictional story. When I blend the news, I maintain a journalistic style to give the news its own element of reality and make the reader feel like they are truly in the universe of the fictional drama of my characters.

As I take this journalistic approach, I find that the modern American Journalist is taking my “fictionalistic” approach to their journalism. As one journalist, Don Marsh (http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Frames-Journey-Journeyman-Journalist/dp/193337036X) pointed out in a recent lecture on “The Evolution of TV News,” many of the modern news producers are not journalist. Actually, their backgrounds are more Hollywood focused. They quest after ratings and the money that comes with them, causing them to have a narrow vision of providing entertainment rather than focus on bringing out a powerful story of news that is needed to make rational and informed decisions. Let us examine for a moment the standard local news broadcast. Each half hour news show has at least 8 minutes of commercials. The evening news always starts the same. The first five minutes is spent discussing news about some drive by shooting or gang violence or showing the “dope on the table” so that the viewer can feel good for an instant. Then the rest of the seventeen minutes is spent showing brief snippets of national news teasers, the weather, sports and news stories where the reporter has decided to be a self proclaimed star in their own private infomercial and put themselves into the middle of their own “objective” news story.

If this was not bad enough, the industry of journalism is now outsourcing their news departments. Some reporters reporting on local news are not from or live in the area they are reporting. This is not an epidemic of just the visual news media, but is being seen in the floundering newspaper industry as well. While my own local newspaper, The St. Louis Post Dispatch, is shipping non-journalist jobs overseas, it is a matter of time that they will follow the steps of other newspapers. There is a newspaper in California whose news reporters rely only on the internet to create their stories. These journalists have to do rely on the internet—they live in India. They go to the city hall websites and others to pull their news stories and present them as local news to the reader. I cannot help but wonder how they could possible tackle social issues such as social justice, political corruption, the local effects of drugs, poverty and more.

Today, the American Journalist relies less and less on the skills of the “three I”s (Information, investigation, and instrumentation) to generate their stories and more on sensationalism. I know how this blog entry reads. “David, you have broken your word never to rant in your blogs.” I am not ranting, I promise. As I wrote, as a fictionalist, I use the news to set my fiction in reality. I try to make the dramatic more so with a journalistic piece based on reality. One purpose is to make the reader question the social issues behind the fictional and nonfictional story. But, let us look one last time at the journalist—just to prove I am not ranting. How many times have you seen on your local news pictures of big fires going through vacant buildings? The fires are bright against a night sky, and there is something mesmerizing about the flames. The reporter reports that officials are looking in to the cause of the flames, etc. But, did you notice it? Did you notice the one question that is never explored? Do you even realize that the question was not asked? What question? The question is “why are these buildings abandoned or vacant in the first place? What is happening in this neighborhood, in this town or city to have so many abandoned or vacant buildings?” Like a spider’s web, the questions and the deeper story stretch out in all directions from those two unasked and non-investigated questions, that I as a factionalist would pursue in my story.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information on what I am writing and other news.