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I don't know how our journalists came to see "storytelling" as the heart of what they do, and "storyteller" as a self-description. I can think of 4-5 elements of journalism more central than "story." Truthtelling, grounding public conversation in fact, verification... listening.
Read @ub14 on how bizarre the centrality of "story" can seem. "After I left law for journalism, I learned that journalists do, in fact, call the people in their stories 'characters.' I remember how astonished I was when I learned that..." Good piece. niemanlab.org/2018/12/the-st…
Or, on the same point — how did journalists come to see themselves a society's storytellers and what are the costs of this misfit self-conception? — read @jeffjarvis on the Der Spiegel scandal, which is all about this. The seduction of storytelling: medium.com/whither-news/t…
Here's a post I wrote about this inflation of the term "story" in journalism. It was not one of my more popular pieces. pressthink.org/2014/12/i-had-… 
To complete this mini-thread on the abuse of "story" in journalism, a post I wrote on the debacle at Rolling Stone, which involved a pre-set narrative in search of a setting where it could rise. That's backwards. pressthink.org/2015/04/rollin…
"Journalism is uniquely suited to tackle the world’s most vexing problems — the erosion of facts and the accelerating effects of climate change — not just through stories, but increasingly through technology services." niemanlab.org/2018/12/journa… By @corybe
Re: storytelling. This was one of the biggest achievements in journalism during the W. years. nytimes.com/2005/12/16/pol… It has amazing and disturbing facts in it. It had huge effects. It was a revelation. Won a Pulitzer. Read it and you will find it weak to non-existent as "story."
