(In anticipation of the 2016 National Magazine Awards ceremony, below is a lightly adapted reproduction of my introduction to The Best American Magazine Writing 2015, published in December 2015)

Before you delve into what will no doubt be the final edition of The Best American Magazine Writing, let us all pause to memorialize the demise of the great magazine story. Indeed, you may be deciding to purchase this volume as a kind of collectors’ edition, one to pull down from the shelf one day and regale your kids with tales of a time when quality magazines thrived. Perhaps you hope to later pawn it off on eBay to some Brooklyn hotel proprietor, seeking a touch of classy nostalgia for the lobby.

It’s been a good run for magazine writing—at least 150 years, by most calculations. But I’ve been reading up on the state of the business and I can report back that the future is dire. The enemy, it turns out, is you and I. Or rather, it is what the demon Internet has done to us, through the Web and the smartphones upon which it is consumed. Always in the pocket, always bleeping its siren call of apps and games, Twitter and Snapchat, and every other flashing distraction—or, as us magazine-lovers might say, affliction. Always conspiring to eliminate our desire for prose longer than a brunch photo caption.

So we’ve been told, at least, in countless articles built on the indelible strength of anecdotal reflections. A few years ago, on that same Web, I chanced upon an infographic which purported to capture the stark nature of this decline:

I don’t think data gets clearer than that! There we were in the late 19th century, massive attention spans primed for serialized Dickens. And now, as it stands, by the year 2020 our attention will hold to little more than five single-syllable words in a sitting. Farewell Best American Magazine Writing, greetings Best American Sequences of Five Monosyllabic Words.

It may comfort you to know, however, that we are not the first generation to witness the death of great magazine writing. That bell began tolling, some would say, as far back as 1911, when a run of unprofitability forced Samuel S. McClure to sell off McClure’s—founded in 1893, and the birthplace of the muckracking narrative journalism of Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens—to creditors who slowly bled it to death. Sure, the 19th century also produced long-running magazines like National Geographic, Harper’s, and The Atlantic Monthly. But as avid readers watched the likes of Munsey’s and The Century follow McClure’s down the hole, the stench of death was already upon us.

The 1920’s brought some hope, with the advent of Time and The New Yorker, which alongside The New Republic, Fortune, and Esquire were harbingers of a great century ahead. But when Vanity Fair came (in 1913) and went (in 1936), it was only a hint of the carnage that the era of radio would bring. We lost the titanic trio of Scribner’s, Forum, and Liberty—you remember them, of course—not to mention Living Age. When the Delineator went from over two million subscribers in 1929 to suddenly ceasing publication in 1937, the writing was on the wall.

Wait, you say, what of the famed New Journalism of mid-century? Wonderful, inventive work it was, its novelistic style and immersive reporting coursing through the likes of Esquire, Rolling Stone, and New York. But the 1950s and 60s also cost us Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post Magazine, and in the 70s so went the agenda-setting Life and Look. The legendary Ramparts threw bombs for just thirteen years. New Journalism swashbuckler Scanlan’s lasted only one.

By 1985, then-Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham acknowledged the approaching end of great magazine writing, in a Christian Science Monitor story delineating how television had finally replaced “the durable word as the lingua franca of American thought.” “You’ve got to work with what you’ve got,” Lapham said of America’s remaining readers; and what we had, he observed, was a generation raised on “MTV and ‘The A-Team.’ ” It had come time, the Monitor concluded, “to kiss long-form journalism goodbye.” (And yet: The 1980s and 90s saw the return of Vanity Fair and the launch of both Wired and Spy, the magazine-lover’s magazine, which burned as brightly as any publication ever has, before being extinguished in 1998.)

Now, of course, the Internet has decimated the tattered remains of our attention span. Worse, we’re told that it has paradoxically fostered a new scourge for great magazine writing: more of it. In just the last five years, web sites and magazines new and old—from Nautilus to BuzzFeed to Matter to The Atavist Magazine, which I edit—have added to an ambitious resurgence in long, serious magazine writing. While this might seem like a sign of life, critics have explained that in fact such efforts are diminishing this great craft. Terms like “longform” and #hashtags like #longreads—through which readers recommend work they appreciate to other potential readers—only serve to dilute what was once the purview of discriminating enthusiasts alone. “The problem,” Jonathan Mahler wrote in the New York Times in 2014, “is that long-form stories are too often celebrated simply because they exist.” It was bad enough when our capacity to produce and read great stories collapsed. Now it seems we’ve turned around and loved magazine writing to death.