The universe and narrative-style news, two seemingly unrelated topics, were brought together in a presentation on Monday by Medill faculty members Abigail Foerstner and Michele Weldon. Forestner narrated the accomplishments of a famous space scientist in her latest book, “James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles.” Weldon told the crowd of more than 30 people that the front pages of America’s newspapers are abandoning hard news for features. This shift in news reporting is the subject of Weldon’s book, Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page.

The great James Van Allen

Foerstner, a lecturer at Medill, told the audience in the McCormick Tribune Center Forum that James Van Allen “literally helped to remap our [planetary] neighborhood as we know it.”
In between teaching health and science journalism in the Chicago newsroom, Foerstner spent several years researching and writing about the man who, among other accomplishments, helped discover the radiation belts that encircle the Earth and cosmic rays. Foerstner weaved details about the Cold War with Allen’s personal history.

“As a result of [Allen’s] work, scientists realized that cosmic rays were literally shooting into our solar system… they realized that … they were looking at the fingerprints of the birth and death of stars,” Foerstner said. “They were looking at the forces that have become the building blocks of our solar system and of interstellar space.”

Soft news is still news

For her latest book, “Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page,” Weldon, an assistant professor at Medill, compared more than 100 front pages from 20 American newspapers for eight dates in 2001 and 2004. After three years of research she noticed a shift from a hard news style writing towards a more narrative-style writing.

“It was my feeling that I was reading more and more ‘Little Jimmy’ stories,” Weldon said. “The stories start with ‘Little Jimmy used to play baseball’ and then it ends up being a story about property taxes because he doesn’t have a park to play in.”

While narrative style writing was used as a form of therapy for readers and aspiring writers in Weldon’s book, “Writing to Save Your Life, ” Weldon stressed that even though a more narrative and anecdotal style of writing is what the readers want, it can lead to a democratizing of the news and distrust for official sources.

“The danger is …getting citizen journalism information that isn’t vetted and spreads from story to story,” Weldon said. “We’re inviting inne- activity and we’re losing gate-keepers. So we have to be skeptical about the information.”