"Many of today’s popular new media forms—podcasts, Substacks, and social media feeds—rely for their techniques and their content on the old medium of long fact. The popular podcast Freakonomics Radio was derived from the host’s 2005 book. The pioneering Serial podcast used the techniques of narrative nonfiction writing in audio form—and emerged out of public radio’s This American Life, whose founder, Ira Glass, edited the 2007 anthology The New Kings of Nonfiction, which linked audio storytelling with literary storytelling of prior eras. Reams of streaming documentaries and fictional dramas that strive for verisimilitude (such as Succession and The Diplomat) are made by showrunners and screenwriters versed in narrative nonfiction. Shows from Morning Joe to Rachel Maddow present authors as experts alongside policymakers and elected officials, and Maddow is herself the author of four narrative nonfiction books. Opening the broadcast, she often relates an episode drawn from the history books—literally—and then pointedly joins it to the present.
Those figures generally present books that are recognizably “on topic.” That’s good and necessary. But through my own work as an author and teacher, I’ve been struck by the pertinence of nonfiction books that don’t deal directly with current affairs. These books develop narratives that at first glance are well outside the news cycle, but as you read them, you find they speak powerfully to the moment precisely because they don’t succumb to the presentism, partisanship, and winners-and-losers schemas too often regarded as inviolable norms of media today."
Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever
Cuts in publishing and book reviewing imperil the future of narrative nonfiction, and our understanding of the world around us.
The New Republic (newrepublic.com)
