Longform

Cringing at the fetish misses the point

By Ben Wolford

On Tuesday, Columbia Journalism Review published an article called “Longform Overload,” which featured several publications, including my startup, Latterly, that focus on narrative journalism. The article said the longform market is saturated, that the journalists behind these new publications “risk creating a vanity project” and that their proliferation is part of a “fetishization” of long stories.

People on Twitter jumped in as though the article had finally given voice to their long-held concerns. Many agreed there’s a “longform bubble” and that we’ve reached “peak longform.” Others lamented that, yes, these startups are vanity projects not built to serve readers. CJR’s social media editor posted a meme with Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls saying, “Stop trying to make longform happen. It’s not going to happen.” The editor added, “How I feel about it, tbh.”

I get why they’re saying this, and on one level I agree with it. Longform is a buzzword, and buzzwords are annoying. Many publications are jumping on the bandwagon, even BuzzFeed. Bandwagons are also annoying. The CJR author quotes the editor of The Atlantic, who said writing long is used as a “shortcut to credibility.” That’s true. There’s some really dull stuff out there, packaged big to look important. In a perfect, well-staffed industry, there would be lots of editors to beat those stories into shape or kill them. But give readers credit; if it’s boring or bad, they’ll quit reading, and they certainly won’t pay for a subscription.

We could stop branding things as longform when what they actually are is narrative form, but it really doesn’t matter. Quite often, longform refers to excellent work by the most talented writers in the business. I won’t talk about Latterly, though I love our stories and think we’re bringing fresh international reporting into the mix. I’m talking about journalists like Joshua Bearman of Epic, who wrote the story that became Argo; Stephan Faris, the Time correspondent now with Deca who wrote this great piece about the silliness of the world’s immigration system; Francesca Borri, whose unimaginable bravery covering the Syrian Civil War produced this gut-wrenching piece in Compass Cultura (and who also wrote an important essay called “Woman’s Work” in CJR); and, of course, Jill Abramson, whose new venture is sure to be brilliant. All of these publications were mentioned under that headline, “Longform Overload.”

The CJR story also says startups including Deca, Byliner and Latterly grew “out of service to the journalists who want a home for their features,” as opposed to a desire to serve readers. Twitter people agreed this is a bad thing. But I’m not so sure. Serving journalists and serving readers are not mutually exclusive, and, frankly, you can’t have the latter without the former.

Stop creating hospitable platforms for journalists and they’ll stop being journalists, either by force or by reluctant choice (remember Allyson Bird’s “Why I Left News”?). Dysfunction in the traditional media (layoffs, story quotas, Tribune Co.) has created an industry brain drain. I started Latterly for a lot of reasons, but one of them is to restore some dignity to the craft. We’re not paying a lot right now — our per-issue budget for four stories, photos and graphics is about $2,500 — but it’s decent, and it’s something. With a nudge from Kickstarter and a solid base of subscribers, I hope that soon Latterly can pay more.

I think what the article was really getting at is more basic and doesn’t have anything to do with longform. All markets are crowded, but that doesn’t stop entrepreneurs from trying to meet a need well enough that people pay them to fill it. If, ultimately, Latterly or any of these other startups fail, it’s not because there’s too much narrative journalism. It’s because they didn’t deliver the right stories to the right people in the right way. We’re all trying to figure out how to do that. For the sake of great journalism that benefits writers and readers, let’s keep trying to make longform happen. It’s going to happen.