Liberal Talk Radio

There’s a great piece (start at the bottom of page 2 and continue) in the Observer this week about the “trend piece” — you know, the kind of New York Times story that takes three examples of a behavior and calls it a trend (e.g., Laptops). It’s great reading if you’ve become jaded about this, er, trend:

The basic formula has long carried reporters and readers alike through lazy vacation months: colorful quotations from a number (specifically, three) of the trendsetters; a blurb or two from academic experts; some vaguely thesis-related statistics; a reference to the broader zeitgeist.

Now the emphasis seems to be less on which way the cultural winds are blowing and more on the gaps in the stories, through which the wind leaks out.

. . .

Trend pieces often begin with input from a friend or colleague. Sometimes, those casual observations spiral outward to the larger culture, gathering more and more evidence in their widening loops.

This is the subjective style, the approach generally practiced at papers such as, for instance, The New York Observer. The subjective piece persuades and catches on (search Nexis for “Man Flab”) or it passes as a curiosity (search for “Floppy Woo”).

. . .

Every decline requires a peak. On June 22, 2003, The Times published Warren St. John’s “Metrosexuals Come Out.” No one needed to be reminded, that summer or afterward, what the piece described. The metrosexuals were upon us.

But even Mr. St. John was unsure if he had a true trend on his hands. “With that story,” Mr. St. John said recently, “I felt that a group of marketers were convinced that [metrosexuals] existed. I found people who said that they actually fit that description. What I can’t possibly know because I’m not old enough, or not smart enough, [is] if that creature is the same as one in the 1940s with different hair products. It may well be that Kiehl’s Lotion is the Brylcreem of the late 90’s.

“I felt that the reaction to that piece showed that it was on-target, but maybe that’s just because I’m a metrosexual.”

Mr. St. John’s years at the Times Styles desk (and before that, at The Observer) have made him something of a practitioner-theorist, and his estimations of the state of the trend piece aren’t particularly promising. Some of it may be personal: “Literally every week,” he said, “some guy will pitch a story to me that says macho guys are back, and someone else will pitch one that says it’s time for a new new metrosexual.”

But his critiques mostly target the slipperiness of the genre itself.

“In my mind, the red flag is the simple phrase ‘more and more,’” Mr. St. John said. “You ought to be able to tell me how many more. If you can’t tell me how many more, maybe you don’t have a story. It begs, you know, head scratching. It’s such a bold claim. More and more! Really? Jeez! How many more?

“There’s an inherent parlor-game component to the trend story — if it’s not happening, it doesn’t mean anything,” Mr. St. John said. “Editors in general don’t like to publish stories about random quirky things. So there’s a kind of pressure to put things into a context, to put it into something broad and culturally meaningful.”

Which gets at the central problem: “Just because something is interesting,” Mr. St. John said, “doesn’t mean it’s a trend.”

But it might just make it as a trend piece.