Is Long Form Journalism Dying?

Last week there was a little tiff on Twitter between Reuters blogger Felix Salmon and Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget. The fight broke out after Felix scorned Business Insider for basically crapping on the internet.

Egos and paychecks aside, these two gentlemen symbolize a much bigger trend in media. Felix represents the old guard who enjoy gathering a set of facts and then making love to them through prose. Henry represents the new wave who, for the most part, gather facts and shoot them out quick and dirty.

I can understand Felix’s resentment. He spends a lot of time and energy working a story. However, the masses don’t care how many words are written or how well. They simply want the bullet points (this fact is probably amplified for business news because information is actionable and advantages are lost when dilly-dallying over a story arch — there’s a reason why a Bloomberg terminal condenses news into a twitter style feed).

If you disagree, let’s take a couple contextual examples:

The Long Form Ideal: Portfolio

Portfolio (Felix’s former employer) immediately became my favorite long form business magazine. The articles were well researched and covered very interesting current events. However, despite heavyweight brand writers like Michael Lewis and Tom Wolfe penning for the mag, Portfolio shuttered in April 2009 after less than two years.

David Carey, a group president at Condé Nast who managed Portfolio, said, “Editorially, we were proud of the product and the team that produced it. But our timing, in terms of building an advertising franchise, proved to be terrible.”

I was shocked. The writing was superb, the ads were premium, the audience was high-networth (i.e., quality), and the brand was sexy. If long form was king and advertisers were looking for rich people with disposable income, this magazine should have shrugged off any managerial mistakes and survived like MarketWatch after the dotcom collapse. But it didn’t.

The Short Form Ideal: Business Insider

Business Insider has become one of my first stops in the morning. Nearly every major news story is covered and I get the bullet points (with a serving of humor and wit). Therefore, in about 15 minutes I have a very good idea of what’s going on in the world of important news.

Business Insider is now larger than former financial media heavyweight TheStreet.com. Whether you like Business Insider or not, they are meeting demand and making money (Henry says they are “break even.”). Clearly, that’s the opposite of Portfolio.

Change and Old Farts

There is a place for both long and short form journalism. But I’d like to see how many people abandoned Michael Lewis’s blockbuster long form article “The End” after 2 minutes or so. (BTW: the takeaway from Lewis’s long form piece was that Wall Street was forever changed after the crash. He was wrong. This year’s bonuses rivaled those of the bubble. So what was his “long form” really worth??)

Based on what I’ve learned running Wall St. Cheat Sheet and observing which independent blogs are incredibly popular (The Big Picture, Calculated Risk, etc.), I can confidently say there is a behavioral shift wherein information consumers prefer short form to long form.

Let’s look at my own behavioral changes: I used to read approximately 2 books and 5+ magazines a week — cover-to-cover. My basement is a library. Now I read about 1 book per month, I read The Week cover-to-cover (which, by the way, is one of the only magazines which has increased circulation annually through the entire recession), and by the time I look at my physical magazines I already got the bullet points from the web. So, most long form is an indulgence like reading a book after digesting the Cliff or Spark Notes.

I’m willing to bet long form continues to lose popularity as the younger, web savvy generations continue to displace the older generations. For example, I recently emailed my 17-year old cousin a 3 paragraph email and he texted me: U couldv told me that in a txt. Do you think he sits down and reads 1500 word essays?

There was a time when the written word threatened the sanctity of oral traditions. Then the television encroached on the written word. Now, the Internet has put communication in a tailspin. With the Internet’s ability to deliver information through video, written word, pictures, and voice, I think long form written word will soon be an antique.

Like my grandfather says, “evolve with the times.” There will always be long form financial journalism for those who enjoy a wordsmith who scoops the drama behind the bullet points. But as the Information Age grows while our finite waking periods remain constant, I think the younger generations will look to enjoy more content in a day while those who prefer less become what my grandfather calls “old farts.”

How have your info consumption habits changed? Let us know in the thoughts below …