The vitality of long-form journalism

Print is a dying medium. Long-form is a style, and it will live forever.

I am not the first to write about the state of long-form journalism — which encompasses in-depth, stylized reporting built around an evocative narrative—nor will I be the last. Indeed, two weeks ago, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, James Bennet, argued that we should do away with the term “long-form” altogether.

I think Mr. Bennet is probably right. However, before we eliminate “long-form” from the writing community’s vernacular it’s important to take a hard look at how the term became widely used, the recent evolution of in-depth reporting, and the future of long-form (or whatever we’ll call it in the future).

What follows is my modest contribution to the Great Long-form Debate.

A red flag in an unlikely place

It was May of last year, and two huge news stories had just flashed across the ever droning big screen TV at my office. The IRS was found to have acted with bias against conservative political organizations that applied for tax-exempt status, and Congressional hearings were being held to investigate whether a cover up had been mounted in the aftermath of the attacks on the US embassy in Benghazi.

These were big stories! My interest piqued, I clicked the WSJ icon in my Bookmarks Bar expectantly and prepared to read the Journal’s headlines. However, when the home page had fully rendered, I couldn’t believe what I saw.

On this major news day in May 2013, almost all of the above-the-fold real estate on the WSJ home page was occupied by a huge photo of David Beckham and an accompanying headline announcing his retirement. Worse still, most of the pixels that remained were dedicated to a click-bait piece entitled “What’s a CEO worth?” Links to coverage of the IRS and Benghazi scandals were barely visible.

This is it, I thought, If the WSJ is swinging toward Buzzfeed, then good, solid journalism really is dying.

A recent history of the Great Long-Form Debate

A lot of ink, both real and digital, has been spilled on either side of the Great Long-form Debate in recent years.

The pessimistic perspective: a funeral in the making

The pessimists write eulogies for an art form that they believe to be on its death bed. To them, declining word counts of news articles and the simultaneous rise of “viral news” (which, they would have us know, is NOT news) signify society’s ever slackening appetite for in-depth, heavily analytical reporting.

In their view, long-form journalism is a star burning rapidly through the final phase in its life, it’s recent past a series of forceful and fiery transitions:

Hot like the sun (industrial revolution — early ‘90s): the golden age of newspapers and magazines — a stack of magazines in every mailbox and waiting room—crescendoed through most of the twentieth century up to the early nineties.

(industrial revolution — early ‘90s): the golden age of newspapers and magazines — a stack of magazines in every mailbox and waiting room—crescendoed through most of the twentieth century up to the early nineties. A bloated red giant (early 90s — early 00s): a fleeting moment when traditional written media touched more viewers than ever before during the adolescence of the Internet thanks to the proliferation of websites, WiFi, and Amazon books.

(early 90s — early 00s): a fleeting moment when traditional written media touched more viewers than ever before during the adolescence of the Internet thanks to the proliferation of websites, WiFi, and Amazon books. An ever-dimming dwarf (present): Ousted by newsfeeds, aggregators, and, my two favorites, listicles (articles made up of lists) and charticles (infographics accompanied by a few paragraphs of commentary), long-form is careening into an academia-like state characterized by very limited readership and increasingly esoteric writing.

The revenue picture for the largest American magazine publishers isn’t pretty.

The changing-media-industry storyline is way too complex to tackle here, but I will do my best to outline the developments that seemed to have pushed long-form into a bit of a corner (readers are encouraged to contribute to their own insights; I’ve surely missed some):

Social media : In the early days of social, time spent on social networks meant time not spent consuming traditional written content (email and AIM were also precursors in this way). Perhaps more important, the growth of social also conditioned people to consume the short bursts of information, which were proliferated by Twitter and Facebook’s News Feed.

: In the early days of social, time spent on social networks meant time not spent consuming traditional written content (email and AIM were also precursors in this way). Perhaps more important, the growth of social also conditioned people to consume the short bursts of information, which were proliferated by Twitter and Facebook’s News Feed. Aggregators: Aggregators put themselves between readers and journalists. First, news aggregators linked to content created by other media outlets (a la Drudge Report). Then aggregators began to digest and summarize reporting done by major publishers. Because busy people naturally gravitated to summarized content, many readers ceased visiting “The Source” (i.e. traditional news and journalistic outlets).

Forbes used to be a stodgy business publication. Look at its trending articles from Tuesday, 12/3/13!

Viral “news” and listicles : Taking aggregated content to its logical extreme, the BuzzFeeds and Thought Catalogs of the world realized that many people would rather read literal lists of facts or thoughts oriented around a theme, and they began to attract A LOT of viewers. Worse still for long-form, traditional news outlets like Forbes and the Washington Post (as if to shout, We’re still here!) began to mimic the “popular kids” with listicles and salacious (and often misleading) article titles of their own.

: Taking aggregated content to its logical extreme, the BuzzFeeds and Thought Catalogs of the world realized that many people would rather read literal lists of facts or thoughts oriented around a theme, and they began to attract A LOT of viewers. Worse still for long-form, traditional news outlets like Forbes and the Washington Post (as if to shout, We’re still here!) began to mimic the “popular kids” with listicles and salacious (and often misleading) article titles of their own. Mobile: Many publishers were slow to follow readers as they moved to digital devices. As a result, the downright ugly rendering of text and images on news and magazine websites made them a pain to read, and publishers were unable to monetize their newly-digital readers until they invested in digital platforms that both attract readers and serve ads.

According to the pessimists, these forces (and more that I probably missed) signal the impending death of long-form written content.

The optimistic view: long-form has evolved, and a Golden Age is in the making

Optimists agree that new media has forced long-form, like other forms of traditional media, to evolve. In their view, however, this evolution has not jeopardized long-form writing; it has made long-form more vibrant and widely distributed than ever.

It’s hard to argue with the optimists on this point. New platforms make it simple to combine fantastic written stories with enriching images and videos; the onscreen reading experience, re-imagined on tablets and e-readers, is more engaging than ever before; and new online portals dedicated to long-form writing enable readers to discover and share great writing with a few keystrokes. These trends can be summarized as platforms, devices, and portals:

Platforms: In addition to stalwart blogging platforms like TypePad and Wordpress, upstarts like Medium and Atavist are making it, in the words of Medium founder Ev Williams, “dead simple to write and present a beautiful story without having to be a designer or programmer.” Medium has given amateur writers an insanely easy to use platform for creating and sharing, and Atavist is enabling publishers (see this stunning piece from the New York Times Magazine) and amateurs (with Creativist) to weave rich visual context into written narrative by integrating images and video.

Devices: iPads, Kindle Fires, and other tablets are the yin to new platforms’ yang. Beautiful digital articles with picture and video would be lost on readers without the ever-growing menu of handheld devices with surreally high resolution screens. Adoption of these new technologies is rising, and new content formats geared toward tablets and e-readers are revitalizing the onscreen reading experience.

iPads, Kindle Fires, and other tablets are the yin to new platforms’ yang. Beautiful digital articles with picture and video would be lost on readers without the ever-growing menu of handheld devices with surreally high resolution screens. Adoption of these new technologies is rising, and new content formats geared toward tablets and e-readers are revitalizing the onscreen reading experience. Portals for discovery and sharing: More than ever, great writing is only a few keystrokes away. Leading the way in long-form content discovery for the last few years have been sites dedicated to collecting the best long-form writing on the web—of these, Longform.org, Longreads, Byliner, and The Big Roundtable are on my shortlist. More recently, leading members of the new media establishment—like The Verge and BuzzFeed (via BuzzReads)—have followed suit by creating separate digital real estate for in-depth reporting.

All of these developments have made creating and finding great writing easier in a growingly complex digital world.

Who’s right, and what does the future hold for long-form?

I was quick to join the pessimistic camp at first. After all, if you focus only on the negative data, the storyline is obvious. Print media advertising revenue has taken a nosedive over the last ten to fifteen years; many languishing regional newspapers and magazines have gone 100% digital or closed their doors completely to combat shrinking revenue; and, as a result, layoffs have put many journalists out of work in a time when well-compensated writing jobs are becoming increasingly elusive.

However, while bite-sized articles were the hot new girl in glass over the last year or two, long-form is making an I’m-back-and-sexier-than-ever comeback like Sandy in Grease. As noted above, publishers, like the NY Times with last year’s “Snow Fall”, are buying in—even BuzzFeed, as noted above. Google, too, is getting in on the act. Fed up with the crap being pumped onto the internet by content farms and regurgi-bloggers (the journalistic equivalent of the village busybody), the brains at the Googleplex launched a feature earlier this year that highlights relevant in-depth content in search results.

Overall, things seem to be looking up for long-form.

Don’t get me wrong—its place in the media world will continue to evolve. Listicles, charticles, tweets, and crappy photo slide shows aren’t going away. However, Lewis Dvorkin of Forbes bids us to remember that short, snappy content and in-depth reporting can actually coexist quite nicely.

There is also no denying that traditional business models will continue to be challenged—no reminder of the print media business model’s ongoing decay is starker than the move by the New Yorker to cut its number of printed issues in half. But to dwell on the move from print to digital misses the point: Print and long-form, while inextricably linked by a shared history, are not equivalent.

Print is a dying medium. Sometime in the not so distant future, all written content—long-form and otherwise—may be digital, and words like “magazine” may fade into antiquity (like “phonograph”).

Long-form, however, is a style. And it will never be outdated.