It’s a cliché that failure is often the best teacher. But that goes for journalism, too – that is, nothing so clearly clarifies the rules of narrative journalism so much as rule-breaking can. By “rule breaking,” though, I mean two very different things. First, there are those moments of a breakdown in reporting or editing, when a writer transgresses the taboos of journalism and, by doing so, shows where the boundaries are.  Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, which deals with ethical conundrums around “subject relations” and around writing a nonfiction story itself, is a great introduction to this tricky subject. (I also share my own views on Malcolm’s book on this site.)

Sometimes, though, it can seem that Malcolm’s case (about Joe McGinnis) is an exception. Yet the often-unacknowledged truth is that those “boundaries” or ethical rules or reporting are everywhere, but they’re often invisible or unstated–and many can assume that readers and/or students know them, or can pick them up just by reading the work of successful reporters over and over again. I actually think the opposite is true: for instance, if you want to know the rules of fact-checking and verification common to the trade’s best reporting, read the Columbia Journalism Review coverage of the famous reporting fiasco regarding accusations of rape at the University of Virginia. By doing that, you see where reporters and editors can fall down on the job, and thus what–in the best of situations–is expected of them.

But in the second sense of rule-breaking I mean narrative journalism that approaches parody – that is, those rare moments when a narrative journalist does something so “over the top” or well that it becomes funny, and in that way shows us the conventions of the form they’re using. Two great examples of this effect are Susan Orleans’ famous essays, “Show Dog” and “The American Man, Age 10.”  Because Orlean does these “profiles” so “straight”–that is, with a kind of deadpan execution of all the implicit rules of her form–we might not think of them as “parody” at all. But that’s my point here: what both of these tales do beautifully is to show us that we already implicitly knew what many of the rules of the profile or celebrity profile customarily are, and what becomes funny is who or what they are applied to. Neither of Orleans’ essays’ “fail,” of course, in the conventional sense–far from it. But they do “show up” and satirize the expectations of the profile genre we carry with us. It’s a way of learning, you might say, what you do already know.