DISCOVERING THE EXPLANATORY REPORT IN AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS Kathy Roberts Forde This study of the explanatory report attempts to make a meaningful contribution to the history of the American newspaper by synthesizing existing historical knowledge of the form, documenting the history of the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism, and analyzing the explanatory reports that have won the Pulitzer Prize in this category. This study also offers insights from that history to suggest how newspapers in America might improve their products in the service of democracy. A fundamental strategy, as demonstrated in the exemplary reports identified by the Pulitzer juries, is the greater use of storytelling in explanatory journalism. Such a change might help increase readership and better serve the mandate of the American press to strengthen democracy through fostering discourse in the public sphere. KEYWORDS American newspaper; explanatory report; narrative; Pulitzer Prize Introduction The Pulitzer Prize Board awarded the inaugural prize for explanatory journalism in 1985. More than 20 years later, American journalism history lacks a robust accounting of the explanatory newspaper report, a form of expression in the American press dating at least as far back as the 1930s. Historical knowledge about the emergence and recognition of the form, and the social and cultural forces that gave rise to it, is scattered across the scholarly literature and journalistic discourse. Further, little is known about the story of the Pulitzer Board’s recognition, naming, and definition of the form; the explanatory report’s dominant structural strategies and subjects; and the functions and fortunes of explanation in American newspaper journalism. James Carey famously argued that to write journalism history is to write ‘‘the history of the idea of a report: its emergence among a certain group of people as a desirable form of rendering reality, its changing fortunes, definitions and redefinitions over time’’ (Carey, 1974). The explanatory report embodies one historically conditioned idea of what a news report can be: an explanation and interpretation of complex events and phenomena placed in social, political, or cultural context. This conception of the news report found little expression in late 19th- and early 20th-century US newspapers. In this earlier era, the realistic or objective report *a news report written in inverted pyramid form, emphasizing facts meant to speak for themselves, and delivered in neutral tones *reflected society’s widespread faith in realism and the authority of facts, an inheritance of the Enlightenment project’s apotheosis of reason (Connery, 1990, p. 4; Schudson, 1978, pp. 71  5). As faith in these ideas began to fragment in the 1920s and 1930s, other ideas surfaced *an anxiety about the transparency of facts, the ability of concatenated facts to render a meaningful account of human events, and the problematic moral dimensions of neutrality. In this era, the explanatory report emerged as a new idea about what a news report could and should Journalism Practice, Vol. 1, No 2, 2007 ISSN 1751-2786 print/1751-2794 online/07/020227-18 – 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17512780701275531