“All the News That’s Fit to Print” has been The New York Times’ slogan since then-publisher Adolph Ochs coined the term in 1897. But if the creators of Twitter had a say, the gold standard for American journalists for the past century might follow a creed more like this: “All the News That’s Fit to Print Can Be Done So in 140 Characters or Fewer.”
While Twitter may be the most heavy-handed in its emphasis on brevity, social media in general seem guided by the idea that a large number of short information updates is better than a small number of long ones. And just about everyone has jumped on the bandwagon. On top of their day jobs at national newspapers and magazines, today’s journalists use Twitter, keep Facebook pages and write blogs – all of which are often directly linked to their work at major publications. Americans hunger for constant information delivered at lightning speed, and these media provide that. But is this “shorter is sweeter” philosophy exacting a toll on one of America’s proudest journalistic traditions: the long-form feature article?
According to Alexa Internet, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides information on Web traffic to other Web sites, Twitter is the 47th most-visited Web site in the United States and Facebook is No. 4, while the New York Times is No. 107. As a result of their exponentially increasing popularity, social media are gaining power and clout that few could have predicted, even a few years ago.
Moreover, it seems the repercussions of this fact on journalistic writing are beginning to rear their ugly and unavoidable heads. “Brevity is really efficient, and reading Twitter posts, or Facebook status updates, or headlines on an aggregator site like Drudge or Hollywood Wiretap allows you to skim through huge amounts of data in a very short period of time,” said Entertainment Weekly L.A. Bureau Chief Sean Smith, who has written features for Premiere, Newsweek, and Entertainment Weekly. “But what it threatens to do is to turn journalism into a series of headlines, rather than a series of stories,” which he said can’t convey complexity and nuance beyond the most basic facts.
People’s expectations from the news are changing and well-researched; lengthy stories appear to be moving down on the priority list. Take the example of Premiere, the magazine many considered the leader of American film journalism during its heyday. In April 2007, the publication, which prided itself on in-depth, feature-style reporting, succumbed to the forces of change and published its last issue.
Smith, who worked as a writer and editor at Premiere from 1997 to 2003, calls the magazine’s fate a cautionary tale. “The Web completely exploded and accelerated the news cycle so dramatically that Premiere, as a monthly, just couldn’t keep up,” Smith said. “Because it could not break entertainment news at a time when breaking news became paramount, the magazine became increasingly irrelevant in the culture … You didn’t need to read Premiere anymore to be in the know.”
More than anything, readers want to be in the know. Backstory, context and narrative take the backseat. And as a result of this shifting focus, journalists today are expected to write and report faster, shorter and more clearly. That may sound like a good thing, but it means journalists are so busy posting what Smith calls “micro-truths” that they seldom tell “macro-truths.”
“We become miniaturists, sculptors of non-fiction haiku,” Smith said. “What’s sad about that is that now more than ever, I think, the public needs journalists to step back from the day-to-day of breaking news to make sense of the world around us – to provide insight and context and depth of reporting and knowledge on a subject.”
All that being said, it’s unlikely long-form journalism will cease to exist, at least in the near future.
“Tens of thousands of people read our cover story online each week; sometimes hundreds of thousands,” said New York Times Magazine editor Gerry Marzorati in his keynote address at the 2009 Council for Advancement and Support of Education Editors’ Forum. “The conventional wisdom that the Internet was not friendly to any piece of prose longer than a few hundred words has not been borne out at the Times Magazine site. Our most popular pieces are the longest.”
Smith said he can’t imagine publications known for long-form content, such as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, folding anytime soon. “But those publications are the exception, not the rule,” he said.
And the reason for this is what makes the future of long-form writing so uncertain. “They exist because their readership is mainly highly educated people with high disposable incomes. Those readers are also older – people who have grown up on magazines.”
Thus, the feature’s fate lies in the hands of a generation who prefer the click of a button to the turn of a page. The problem, Smith said, is that the Web – a realm increasingly dominated by briefs, blurbs and tweets – is not the place for long-form journalism. So, will this bring about the end of the feature-length world?
Probably not, but it will almost certainly cause journalistic climate change, which could have more disastrous effects than you might think. “My fear is that fewer and fewer people click past the headline at all,” Smith said. “And that leads to the only thing more dangerous to a democracy than an uninformed public: An uninformed public that thinks it’s informed.”
[email protected]