Michael Kinsley wants to cut down newspaper articles by removing “legacy code,” overlong or overly florid lines that, while checking some traditional journalistic content box, don’t actually advance the story or inform the reader. Fair enough. Felix Salmon more or less agrees, again going on mostly about story length, noting that the Atlantic still does long stories in print (so wonderful for the train!) and but has shorter, web-only content online (along with those dreaded longer stories “reprinted” from the physical magazine). He points out what he sees as the crux of difference via a newspaper example:
…newspaper conventions have been built for physical newspapers, and can look silly in the age of the web — especially when the stories themselves appear, pretty much unchanged, on newspapers’ websites. It might make sense for the physical LA Times to run one big story about Afghanistan, but once that decision is made, no one is going to chop that one big story into three smaller ones for the website.
Right off the bat, he implicitly accepts an assumption that the web version needs to be shorter. If anything, the online edition should be longer, with a note in the physical version to go online for more depth about this or that tribal issue, interactive maps, whatever. That way, when you’re reading the Times on your 2025 model iTablet, everything is suddenly knit together in a way that allows you to expand or contract the amount of information you’re taking in based on your wants/needs of the moment.
I’m not exactly sure why this concept is so hard to understand: In the electronic era, there is no a priori limitation to the relative length or brevity of a story. It need not be artificially and randomly cut to 250 words to squeeze into a particular newshole or avoid a page-jump (think: USAToday), nor stretched to 15,000 words to buff up its apparent “importance.” Stories should be exactly as long as they need to be. I agree with Kinsley that all false equivalencies and labored prose that largely represents today’s idea of journalism needs to go, and soon. This means that if you can cover an important (but expected) House vote in 75 words by excising the fat, then by all means: do so. If providing useful, analytical context demands you go to 400,000 words on the same subject: then do so. THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE SELLING NOW. Editorial opinions (e.g. what is news?) are your only asset. Everyone working in media today should be entirely focused on maximizing the electronic product. Period. Forget about page impressions. Forget about the physical product (e.g. the monthly Atlantic or the daily NYT) and focus on making the best stories you can, whatever their length. Then repackage the very most important of those from your website (that naturally updates whenever it needs to, not on some arbitrary, print-based schedule) and you move it from there into the necessarily very scheduled, physical box that you still put out as best you can (hey, what do you know, that’s where your only physical constraints relative to length and layout are).
That neither Kinsley nor Salmon, both at one level or another tasked with rethinking how journalism works in the internet era mention this at all, and furthermore go so far as to make a case for ever more arbitrary cutting is, shall we say, depressing. That all of legacy media seems to be responding to this by utterly decerebrating their writing, then chopping it up into arbitrary “next page” chunks (even when the story is less than 50 words long), and then festooning the whole package with great gloopy wads of aggressively intrusive advertising that would make Vegas blush is, shall we say, demoralizing.
Lemkin 