Impact-First vs. Story-First

First figure out what would be impactful, then find stories that will humanize it

It’s natural to start with the story.

Something really bad happened, and I’m going to tell you about it. It was problem XYZ that led to “something” happening. That problem is really bad; therefore a top priority should be fixing XYZ.

Much less common is to start with the impact.

ABC, DEF, and XYZ are all problems. DEF is a problem that’s ten times larger than ABC and XYZ combined. Let’s tell the story of DEF so that everyone will understand why it’s a priority (and maybe we can talk about / look at ABC and XYZ later).

As I do every winter, I’ve been reading lots of news articles in my role as a judge for a journalism prize. Most of the stories are well-crafted, full of narratives and photos that humanize societal and governmental problems.

There’s a notable distinction between the impact-first pieces and the story-first pieces. Quite a few journalists and editors can find and tell the “something really bad happened” story-first narrative that makes for good reading (or watching or listening). Not as many succeed at apprising a broader situation, figuring out the biggest problem (DEF above), and telling a story that brings it to life.

I’ll explain this in reference to traffic safety. Over 40,000 people are killed in car crashes each year in the U.S., and that number has increased appreciably over the past decade or so. That represents over 1% of American deaths. If you could magically make cars perfectly safe, you would increase American life expectancy by about half a year — about 10% of the gap in life expectancy between the U.S. and the countries that fare best on that measure.

I wrote several posts about traffic safety last year, trying to focus on a few aspects of traffic safety that have a large impact¹. I am much less effective than most journalists at telling these stories in a manner that is broadly interesting to readers. However, I went impact-first and looked primarily at especially large drivers of traffic deaths. I didn’t spend time on small things like recalls that led to four deaths.

By contrast, there are quite a few stories that focus on rare but story-first traffic safety issues. Skilled journalists spend countless hours telling about the family torn apart when a mom and baby were killed as a result of a defective manufacturing process. Those one-off stories read much better than my geeky, data-centered Substack posts. If they’re told well, regulators or car makers will issue a recall or write legislation to solve a underlying problem that causes a handful of deaths each year. But solving these small problems will wind up saving something like 0.01% of the lives that would be lost in car crashes — and won’t help with the bigger societal challenges.

The good news here is that it’s quite possible to have the best of both worlds. Editors can drive their teams in the direction of impact-first pieces, figuring out where the areas with especially large bang-for-the-buck, then working with their excellent story-tellers to turn them into compelling narratives.

Impact-first storytelling and policymaking would lead to much better outcomes. It would mean looking at and tackling the biggest problems first, rather than the little ones that happen to have compelling stories behind them. And it would save or improve millions of lives.

1. I’ll admit that it’s borderline whether my posts on cyclist fatalities — there are about 1000 per year — fit into this framework.