Len Witt posted a fascinating rhetorical question on the public journalism network today: At 21 which job would you want, print or digital? It’s part of a story (one of so many these days) that represents the navel-gazing of an industry in the midst of collossal change. Witt quotes Jon Gisby, Head of Media Group, Yahoo! Europe:
my gut feel is that if I was an ambitious 21-year-old and had two job offers, one from traditional print and one was from online content or distribution, my guess would be that most people would take the online. A good way of determining whether an industry is in decline or not is to decide what you would do at the age of 21.
It’s rhetorical for me, because I’m not 21. But it’s not rhetorical for a lot of folks we teach as college media advisers. I’ll come back to the question he asked in a moment.
Witt talks about the value of long-form journalism, and it’s the talk of someone who obviously places a high value on its practice. But:
As someone who has been a magazine and feature editor during most of my career, I truly understand the value of long form writing and I am not sure where it fits in the digital world.
And
In the rush to the Internet is anyone thinking of how to make long form journalism even more appealing to audiences?
Any how, my guess is that there are really so few really great reporter/writers, who can make long stories come alive that there will always be a market for them, even if that market shrinks.
Some background: my first exposure to true “long form” journalism came from a magazine: Rolling Stone, to be exact. Rolling Stone’s investigative journalism in the 1980s was more important to me than the interviews with bands and celebrities.
And I think the market for long-form journalism may likely end up in the magazine industry. I am not so sure the companies that run newspapers as part of their media mix will be so likely to run long-form pieces, unless they completely retool the print product as a more reflective, analytical product (a move I would support, by the way).
The value of long-form journalism remains, even in the digital world. But there is much more that can be added to a long-form piece through the addition of digital artifacts, hyperlinks and the like. I would like to see more long-form journalism that adds these features.
Getting back to the question posed by Mr. Gisby, I’m not so sure there’s an easy answer. As Witt notes, it depends on the individual. If a student is really a “word” person, in love with the flow and cadence of prose writing and digging out and stitching together the pieces of a story into a long-form piece, then perhaps the traditional print operation will be the way to go, although I suspect there are not too many of those long-form openings for beginning reporters at traditional newspapers (I was extremely fortunate to get my start in the features department and not the cop beat when I began). Perhaps there are more in the alt-weekly format.
On the other hand, if the student is an info junkie, a techno geek, visually oriented, or just someone who is very tied into the social network that is the World Wide Web, then a position in a traditional print organization would likely be constricting. The online news org holds more promise.
I commented on Witt’s post, because there’s too much of a tendency on the part of some people to tie the platform to the form of journalism. Newspapers are necessarily better at hard reporting, they contend, as if it is the birthright of the printed page to be capable of lengthy reporting and writing. But if that is the birthright of print, then I would argue that an indefinite news hole is the birthright of the Internet, and that greater depth and nuance are possible in that platform. Note the key word: possible.
Witt asked me to write about what I tell my students. It’s a tough question, because I haven’t really considered long-form journalism in relation to online journalism. The last time I taught advanced news and feature writing, I spent most of our time helping the students conceptualize and craft 2,000 word stories, with nary a thought to how to port them to the ‘net.
Now, I’m not so sure I’d teach that class the same way.
But before I taught someone about long-form journalism and its possibilities on the web, I’d like to sit down with a journalist who’s skilled at long-form journalism and work on “web-izing” a piece they had written: figure out what can be added through source documents, visuals, audio and video, timelines, maps, and other features. I’d like to see if we could - together - put a long-form journalism piece on the web that truly is a long-form journalism piece of the web.
And then I’d like to see how people respond.
If I couldn’t do that, I’d at least like to see some examples of how that could be done. Any suggestions?
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