I was glad to see this piece (free reg. req'd) Mark Patinkin in the Providence Journal. It begins:

It was a journalistic turning point for me. I went to Newport to interview a man who had just sailed alone across the Atlantic. It was going to be a dramatic story about boldly facing down nature's fury. I asked him to tell me the most spectacular moments of his trip.

He said there weren't any. It was boring and lonely, and half the time, he was sick below deck.

But didn't he feel like a conqueror?

No, he still felt sick.

It didn't stop me. I kept pumping him for details I could turn into drama.

Then it hit me. I didn't have to. There was an even more compelling angle here: A feature about how crossing the ocean alone isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

That's how I wrote it. It made for great reading. And it had the added advantage of being accurate.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with my editor at the last paper I worked at. This editor prided himself on being a real "story teller" who cared for narrative more than the inverted pyramid.

Of course reporters, who all tend to fancy themselves the next Hemingway, ate this up (myslef included). Trouble was (and is with too much "narrative journalism") that there followed a willingness to pick one compelling theme/hook and make all the facts serve it.

In this case, we were going over a story I was doing on an old, disabled woman who was being threatened with eviction for having taken in her daughter's family after they themselves lost their home as the result of the son-in-law being injured at work and having no income.

My editor picked his theme, something along the lines of the poor "falling" through the cracks (Zero points for originality, I know). Without asking me how the son-in-law was injured, he started playing with a lead that had the guy falling off a ladder. Trouble was, that's not how it happened.

I'm not saying my editor wanted to deliberately insert errors in the story. But you can see how this mindset could produce dangerous results, particularly in the form of reporters who put the telling of the story first and the facts of the story second, with tacit consent from the powers that be. Did this happen at this paper? You bet. Reporters feared having their stories called boring far more than they worried about being called out for playing fast and loose with the facts.