5 ms·

It isn't just that journalism has become an ideological battleground. Even without the cultural warfare, once-mighty publications would still be seen as in decl

It isn't just that journalism has become an ideological battleground. Even without the cultural warfare, once-mighty publications would still be seen as in decline. The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy. Due to the pressures of swiftly producing content that draws maximum clicks, journalists at even august publications are now forced to create articles little distinguishable from a minimum-wage content writer hired off some freelance platform. There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices. Journalists have always chafed at limitations of space, but they are under even more pressure today to be concise and eschew subtleties and nuance. The same length as a traditional magazine article from a couple of decades ago, is now seen as a "long read", something for only a niche audience.

dehrmann 6y ago
> The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy Never forget this bias. It's the primary bias of most major news outlets. CNN wants you to keep watching CNN for more news, even if there isn't enough news to fill airtime, so they drag things out, bring on guests, and favor stories with the potential to keep you glued to your TV.
symlinkk 6y ago
Because 99% of long articles are a waste of time that could be summarized in a sentence or two. This is why no one reads articles here or on Reddit, and just skims the comments instead.
- mitchdoogle 6y ago
  I almost always at least skim an article before diving into the comments. Many times I will read the whole thing, especially if it is short, as this one is. I do believe that most probably don't do that. It's often possible to tell which commenters have read it and which haven't, i.e. if a comment mentions something not even present in the article, or if it mentions something clearly refuted in the article. I think it's important to read the things you comment on, and I think it's important to expect others to do so as well. Ignorance is tolerated too much these days, especially considering that knowledge is easier to obtain now than ever before.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    The number of commentators who have read the article decreases exponentially as a function of length. A good case in point is the biggest ideas in Statistics paper that's hovered around the front page for a while.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    A lot of long form articles are like online recipes though: A giant barely-related narrative about the subject’s home town and hobbies and life philosophies, and hidden within are the 5 lines showing ingredients and how to cook the food.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  Perhaps this is why a lot of comment threads quickly become arguments about the first thing that springs to commenters' minds when they read the headline rather than what the article actually says.
mc32 6y ago
Some forms of long articles are a form of entertainment. They appeal to a segment of society that enjoys long winded and meandering reads. But those are different from long articles which pack a lot of content. Time magazine or Newsweek of yore. The latter didn’t pad the stories with flowery language or add “texture” (things like describing the sofa someone is sitting in and the drapery or wainscoting, etc., that permeates a certain type of writing. That has its place, but not in journalism as much. Long journalism should add direct and proximate information not delve into atmospherics.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  Long-form journalism has been written with an eye to "adding texture" for decades. Some of the most celebrated non-fiction writers of the last half-century—Tom Wolfe, David Foster Wallace, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson—followed in that tradition. "In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,' ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself." https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold-gay-talese/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has...
  - mc32 6y ago
    I’m not saying it doesn’t have its place. I just don’t want it in hard news and related journalism. Sinatra is not a hard news subject. That would belong in Playboy or RollingStone or New Yorker. Imagine a WWII article about any of the mustachioed protagonists and it meandered about their choice of whisker trimming and lifestyle in mountain retreats and seaside dachas instead of all the horrors they caused.
vharuck 6y ago
>There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices. Have there been any studies to back up this pervasive idea of declining attention spans? I'm asking honestly, not combatively. It has some signs of "common sense" beliefs that aren't true or useful: generalizing over a large group, lamenting something lost, and focusing on something poorly defined. Of course, those qualities don't mean it's a false belief, but they do make me want hard data before I believe it. Especially because I've seen signs of the opposite with TV shows. Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Not peer-reviewed research but we do lots of tracking of things like marketing materials in various media. Outside organizations do this sort of work as well. And we see a clear decline in the length of content that people want to consume. I agree that scripted TV hasn't really decreased in length. On the other hand, a lot of video content being consumed is shorter pieces on YouTube.
- valarauko 6y ago
  > * Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect. * Tangential anecdote: I have a friend who's a writer for Netflix & Amazon shows, and the streaming services have fine grained detail on subscriber behavior - at what point in the episode do people tend to stop watching, etc. The streaming service uses this data to create specific models for how shows and individual episodes should be structured to maximize audience retention. The writers are given specific instructions of how many and how frequently "payoffs" need to be peppered throughout the episode. So while shows today might be 45+ minutes long, they're also not written like shows in the past.
benlumen 6y ago
>The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy. Bingo. I honestly think modern "journalism" has more in common with marketing and search engine optimisation than traditional journalism. That's the sort of high-level view I've adopted to explain this decline. I wrote my first and only substack bit about this last year and have been in two minds whether or not to continue with it. https://benlumen.substack.com/p/thank-god-i-never-went-into-journalism https://benlumen.substack.com/p/thank-god-i-never-went-into-...

dehrmann 6y ago

> The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy Never forget this bias. It's the primary bias of most major news outlets. CNN wants you to keep watching CNN for more news, even if there isn't enough news to fill airtime, so they drag things out, bring on guests, and favor stories with the potential to keep you glued to your TV.

symlinkk 6y ago

Because 99% of long articles are a waste of time that could be summarized in a sentence or two. This is why no one reads articles here or on Reddit, and just skims the comments instead.

mitchdoogle 6y ago
I almost always at least skim an article before diving into the comments. Many times I will read the whole thing, especially if it is short, as this one is. I do believe that most probably don't do that. It's often possible to tell which commenters have read it and which haven't, i.e. if a comment mentions something not even present in the article, or if it mentions something clearly refuted in the article. I think it's important to read the things you comment on, and I think it's important to expect others to do so as well. Ignorance is tolerated too much these days, especially considering that knowledge is easier to obtain now than ever before.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  The number of commentators who have read the article decreases exponentially as a function of length. A good case in point is the biggest ideas in Statistics paper that's hovered around the front page for a while.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  A lot of long form articles are like online recipes though: A giant barely-related narrative about the subject’s home town and hobbies and life philosophies, and hidden within are the 5 lines showing ingredients and how to cook the food.
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
Perhaps this is why a lot of comment threads quickly become arguments about the first thing that springs to commenters' minds when they read the headline rather than what the article actually says.

mc32 6y ago

Some forms of long articles are a form of entertainment. They appeal to a segment of society that enjoys long winded and meandering reads. But those are different from long articles which pack a lot of content. Time magazine or Newsweek of yore. The latter didn’t pad the stories with flowery language or add “texture” (things like describing the sofa someone is sitting in and the drapery or wainscoting, etc., that permeates a certain type of writing. That has its place, but not in journalism as much. Long journalism should add direct and proximate information not delve into atmospherics.

chipotle_coyote 6y ago
Long-form journalism has been written with an eye to "adding texture" for decades. Some of the most celebrated non-fiction writers of the last half-century—Tom Wolfe, David Foster Wallace, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson—followed in that tradition. "In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,' ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself." https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold-gay-talese/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has...
- mc32 6y ago
  I’m not saying it doesn’t have its place. I just don’t want it in hard news and related journalism. Sinatra is not a hard news subject. That would belong in Playboy or RollingStone or New Yorker. Imagine a WWII article about any of the mustachioed protagonists and it meandered about their choice of whisker trimming and lifestyle in mountain retreats and seaside dachas instead of all the horrors they caused.

vharuck 6y ago

>There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices. Have there been any studies to back up this pervasive idea of declining attention spans? I'm asking honestly, not combatively. It has some signs of "common sense" beliefs that aren't true or useful: generalizing over a large group, lamenting something lost, and focusing on something poorly defined. Of course, those qualities don't mean it's a false belief, but they do make me want hard data before I believe it. Especially because I've seen signs of the opposite with TV shows. Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect.

ghaff 6y ago
Not peer-reviewed research but we do lots of tracking of things like marketing materials in various media. Outside organizations do this sort of work as well. And we see a clear decline in the length of content that people want to consume. I agree that scripted TV hasn't really decreased in length. On the other hand, a lot of video content being consumed is shorter pieces on YouTube.
valarauko 6y ago
> * Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect. * Tangential anecdote: I have a friend who's a writer for Netflix & Amazon shows, and the streaming services have fine grained detail on subscriber behavior - at what point in the episode do people tend to stop watching, etc. The streaming service uses this data to create specific models for how shows and individual episodes should be structured to maximize audience retention. The writers are given specific instructions of how many and how frequently "payoffs" need to be peppered throughout the episode. So while shows today might be 45+ minutes long, they're also not written like shows in the past.

benlumen 6y ago

>The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy. Bingo. I honestly think modern "journalism" has more in common with marketing and search engine optimisation than traditional journalism. That's the sort of high-level view I've adopted to explain this decline. I wrote my first and only substack bit about this last year and have been in two minds whether or not to continue with it. https://benlumen.substack.com/p/thank-god-i-never-went-into-journalism https://benlumen.substack.com/p/thank-god-i-never-went-into-...