Why Do Journalists Call What They Produce ‘Pieces’?

My friend Jim Ericson, a frequent watcher of cable-news shows on which print journalists are guests, has a complaint about their use of the word piece when they talk about their work products. The problem, he says, is “that such a flattering, self-referential thing — in the way it rolls off the lips of Beltway intelligentsia (of which I was once a small part) — keeps turning up like a cheap, fashionable trinket in peer discourse among D.C. wags and dilettantes. Everyone is wearing the same nondescript thing!”

He’s right that piece is ubiquitous. To quote just one example, a public-radio correspondent said this to another on the air on May 8, in reference to a magazine article about New York’s disgraced attorney general: “So The New Yorker talked with four women — two anonymously, two named in the piece.”

I get the point that piece, which is used not only for writing but also for musical, artistic, and theatrical (“the villain of the piece”) compositions, can suggest self-conscious self-deprecation in the service of self-aggrandizement. And Jim’s not the only one who is unenamored of the word. A magazine-editor friend says, “Where I work, there was a time when we were asked to avoid piece because it’s journalism jargon.” But I’ve used it as long as I can remember in my career as a journalist and editor, and I’m not going to stop now. To me its catchall usefulness outweighs any objections.

The word predates me and Jim, by a lot. One of the Oxford English Dictionary‘s approximately two gazillion definitions of piece is: “A (usually short) literary composition; an article for a newspaper, journal, or similar publication.” The first citation is from Sir Thomas More, in 1533. In 1710, Lord Shaftsbury referred to “That exteriour Proportion and Symmetry of Composition, which constitutes a legitimate Piece.”

In his masterly portrait of journalistic hackery, New Grub Street (1891), George Gissing uses the word freely, though always followed by of and a noun: “Already the sisters were doing a new piece of compilation for Messrs Jolly and Monk.” “For the first time he received a rejected piece of writing without distress.” “No one ever wrote a more subtle piece of criticism; but it was swept aside among the rubbish of the magazines.”

Piece on its own seems to have come into American journalistic fashion in the early part of the 20th century. The OED quotes Dawn Powell’s 1936 novel, Turn, Magic Wheel: “That … fellow who was always after him to write a ‘piece’ for the weekly he ran.” Note the quotation marks.

I’d be willing to bet that the “weekly” the character was referring to was The New Yorker, to which Powell had contributed four pieces by 1936. That magazine, founded by Harold Ross in 1925, was a veritable fount of piece. In the collection of Ross’s correspondence and memos edited by Thomas Kunkel, Letters From the Editor, the word appears 297 times (compared with 27 times for article), almost all referring to pieces of writing. Ross used piece about journalistic pieces, critical pieces, Talk of the Town pieces, humor pieces, short stories, seemingly every genre except poetry. The first writing-specific use in the letters comes in a memo to a staffer in 1926, the year after the magazine’s founding: “Try this — pay him [Alexander Woollcott] for one of the pieces, the longer one.” Three years later, Ross wrote this to F. Scott Fitzgerald:

We got a piece of yours through your agent, Mr. Reynolds, a very good piece for us. This makes us happy.

I wish to God you would write other things for us. You wouldn’t get rich doing it, but it ought to give you satisfaction.

Here’s Ross’s final one, in an interoffice memo he wrote in June 1951, six months before his death:

I earnestly recommend that we abandon the word “understandably,” which has been a fad word with us for a good many months and creeps into all sorts of pieces. I saw it in Life the other day and when Life takes up a word it is time for us to unload, I think.

Ross also used story, mostly referring to works of fiction. Here, in a 1940 letter to H.L. Mencken, he applies it to journalism but then quickly reverts to piece:

Your name came up the other day at a session here in which the political campaign was being considered. It came up when somebody said, “I wish we could think of a story for Mencken to do.” It is unquestionably true that for a certain kind of political story, you would be the best reporter there is. We didn’t have any specific idea for a story, though, and the matter died right where it was. It now occurs to me that you might have an idea for a piece, or pieces. If you have, I wish you would let us know. We could use Reporter at Large pieces (of which you’ve never done one), for instance. …

William Shawn replaced Ross, and piece remained the favored term at The New Yorker, though it wasn’t yet universal in magazine journalism. Calvin Trillin, who arrived in the early ‘60s, reported to me in an e-mail, “I don’t think ‘piece’ was used that way at Time, where I worked before I went to The New Yorker. At The New Yorker, though, it was definitely the term for any piece of writing.”

As the Shawn years went on (he would remain editor through 1987), another word fell into disfavor. In his memoir, My Mistake, Daniel Menaker, a longtime editor at the magazine, recounts this exchange with the sometimes inscrutable Mr. Shawn:

… when I ask about writing a piece about Swarthmore [College, his alma mater], he says, “Well, I really don’t mean to criticize you. I don’t expect people, even the people who work here, to understand these matters and these distinctions. But what you want to write is an article, and The New Yorker doesn’t publish … articles.” [Emphasis in original.]

Piece may be spreading to other realms. When I put a query on the matter on Twitter, the professor and author Jack Lynch replied, “In recent years college students have really taken to ‘piece’ for any work of literature of any form or length.” (Shades of novel.)

But at the same time, as the author Mara Hvistendahl pointed out, a competitor to piece has arrived on the scene. “It’s at risk,” she tweeted, “of being replaced by the even murkier term ‘thing.’ As in: I wrote a ‘thing.’”