Joe Grimm / The Detroit Free Press

Jack Hart wears his passion on his sleeve, and his passion is for storytelling, “the joy of the second half of my career in journalism.”

Hart, a managing editor at the Portland Oregonian, has coached reporters through some notable narratives and on to the Pulitzer Prize. He came to the Free Press to talk with reporters and editors about writing and coaching. In sessions on nonfiction storytelling principles and techniques, Hart described the essentials for what he called a renaissance of storytelling in newspapers, a new golden age.

Although he is excited about what he sees going on in newsrooms across the country, he said that many journalists still must catch up to the movement. “We call most everything we do a story, but if you stop and think about it, you know that’s not true.” Most newspapers, he said, are filled with the ends of stories — the beginnings having been sacrificed at the altar of the inverted pyramid.

Hart illustrated his point by reading from “Ping,” a children’s story with all the classic elements of story, elements that often are missing from newspapers. Those elements are missing, he said, because they are not among narrowly defined traditional journalism’s qualities: urgency, proximity, consequence, prominence and exclusivity. None of those elements are needed to tell a good story. By contrast, the fundamental principles of story often do not spell out what is traditionally thought of as good journalism.

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