Michael Kinsley must have embarked on his media criticism piece in the current (January/February 2010) issue of The Atlantic bereft of ideas for a column. And right after stubbing a toe.
How else does one explain this curious piece? His thesis:
ONE REASON SEEKERS of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.
Really? Write it short and readers would come flooding back to newspapers and magazines? Pity then all those misguided publishers running around like chickens with their heads cut off in search of new platforms to peddle their wares.
Mr. Kinsley’s article begs some response. I just don’t know where to begin: His contention “. . . that newspaper articles are too long” is quite different from his argument that “Newspaper writing . . . is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news.”
By all means, get rid of slipshod, encrusted and encumbered conventional political writing (even as I needlessly encumber my sentence). Does doing this necessarily lead to shorter news stories? Shorn of the “conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news,” you could, conceivably, write newspaper articles twice or three times as long as the offending New York Times and Washington Post pieces that Mr. Kinsley cited. Would they then be the right length? Or, must news stories be short at all cost? How short?
Mr. Kinsley’s critique of bad writing is nit-picky and picayune but valid. His conclusion about the length of newspaper articles being too long is wrong.
What annoyed me most about the Kinsley piece is that it is so uncalled for. Cut out the fat, the encrustation, the conventions? Yes, yes, yes. It still does not mean that writing short, whatever that means these days, would suddenly bring readers who fled to the safe harbor of short writing on the Internet back to newspapers.
I don’t claim to be the average newspaper reader. I’ll even admit to being a news junkie, if not an outright news geek. I love newspapers. I read them and wallow in them. The fact is that some of the best writing I’ve read in newspapers over the years, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post, have been very, very long articles (along with pearly short ones).
The examples are too numerous to name so I’ll focus on the estimable Robert D. McFadden at the Times. I can’t say that I’ve seen him flex his wings in recent months but there was a time when nearly every piece he wrote was the epitome of style and grace.
It was just a dusty, cobwebbed cabin high in the Rockies, as remote as a cougar’s lair. But it suited a man who had always been alone, this genius with gifts for solitude, perseverance, secrecy and meticulousness, for penetrating the mysteries of mathematics and the dangers of technology, but never love, never friendship.
This was the brilliant opening to his Prisoner of Rage profile of the Unabomber that ran in the New York Times in May 1996. That piece surely failed the reactionary dictum to write short. It weighed in at nearly 16,000 words.
I am not advocating that every story in every newspaper run that long, or even one-twentieth that long. The fact is most newspapers, including the New York Times and Washington Post, don’t run very many long stories anymore. If Mr. McFadden still prowls the halls of the Times (decimated over the years by the cycle-rinse-repeat layoffs and buyouts that are the lots of newspapers in this country), he’s certainly is not writing articles like he wrote back in the 90s.
If Mr. Kinsley wants to fault the Times for anything at all, it should be for putting out an ambition-less newspaper that is a pale imitation of gray lady’s tradition of excellence. Any given edition of the Times these days is so mistake ridden, so slipshod one would be forgiven for thinking the place no longer employs copy editors. It is hard to believe that Bill Keller is running this New York Times.
Mr. Keller, in the proud lineage of great Times foreign correspondents, covered big events (the Soviet Union before its dissolution and South Africa before it gave up the ghosts of apartheid). He wrote big stories about big events and won big prizes for his reporting. So that when he ascended to the top at the Times, becoming executive editor, he had truly earned it. There was every reason to believe that the New York Times under his guidance would do great things, achieve greater heights. Even with economic battering and the seismic shift in the business model of the news industry, who would have expected that Keller’s Times would be so small, with so little ambition?
Lost in the hoopla over David Rohde’s excellent memoir published in the Times of his captivity and eventually daring escape and rescue in Pakistan is that Rohde was not on assignment for the Times when he was captured, but on leave working on a book project.
Increasingly, the best writing of the New York Times staff are not found in the pages of the newspaper, but between the covers of books. It’s not that Times’ correspondents didn’t historically write books. They always have, including the Harrison Salisbury tomes (he wrote 29 books!) that I devoured as a student and young professional journalist. But those books grew out work that first appeared in the newspaper. John F. Burns, cut from the Salisbury mold, is one of history’s finest foreign correspondents, jetting from one dangerous outpost to another, be it China, where he was imprisoned, or in the two Iraq wars that he covered.
Practically all of Mr. Burns’ journalistic output went into the pages of the New York Times.
Dexter Filkins, a correspondent in the same Times Baghdad bureau that Mr. Burns led, put his most visceral reporting about the Iraq war in his highly acclaimed book, “The Forever War.”
Let me tackle last Mr. Kinsley’s opening clause—“One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet . . .”—because it rubbed me the wrong way. Call me a madman but I believe—I know it is en vogue to cry a river about the bad moon rising over print media—the print sector of the news media is not nearly as imperiled as many are wont to believe.
People more knowledgeable than me will argue that, indeed, it is. And they’ll cite technological algorithms, trends, facts and scientific data to support their position. I have nothing to refute them. What I know deep in my bones is that news gathering will thrive in the new age, whatever platform emerges to carry that news to the masses.
There are a couple of special cases, of course, where the publisher-owners (think Sam Zell, owner of the Chicago Tribune, in big, blinking red letters) have made disastrous business choices that doom them to lose their particular enterprises. And there is the Wall Street Journal whose historically excellent news pages Rupert Murdoch and his minions are hell bent on turning into another one of the Aussie Raider’s ideologically polluted rags. You could argue that Murdoch’s instinct is correct in trying to turn the Journal into a general interest newspaper, the better to challenge the New York Times. But it is a colossal mistake to taint that paper’s once sacrosanct news pages with ideology.
The fact is, Murdoch does not have a good record of running respectable and profitable newspapers in this country. He turned the New York Post into a money-losing concern. Murdoch’s Midas touch wrecked the Chicago Sun-Times, once one of the nation’s best newspapers. And he may well do for the Journal what he did for the Post and the Sun-Times.
My wish and my hope is that the Chicago Tribune would survive Sam Zell and the Wall Street Journal would survive Rupert Murdoch.
To get back to what I set out to pillory him for, Mr. Kingsley’s admonition to “write short” is one that is beaten into every journalism student and cub reporter every single day that they bore the crucible of being called journalists or news reporters.
Then, the Gannett Company went further with USA Today, creating a more visual, graphic newspaper. With space finite, stories had to be short to accommodate all the graphics. Gannett and USA Today were particularly pernicious with their proselytizing about shorter stories. The general effects were vapid and vacuous newspapers across the land, first at Gannett, then virtually every news outlet went further and further in removing substance and replacing it flash. By the time USA Today saw religion and began running enterprise pieces and longer articles that jump off its front pages, the damage was already done.
Other trends followed. For instance, “regional coverage” replaced local coverage. If a particular issue affected only one town, it’ll be displaced in the paper by stories that affect a number of towns. Then papers dispensed with covering their local community altogether. They stupidly killed the geese that laid so many golden eggs in pursuit of ever larger quarterly profit margins. The ultimate effect is the hollowing out of the “product” to the point of imperiling the very industry.
The Internet has democratized somewhat the apparatus of gathering news and the means of disseminating it. Good writing, long or short, will be read anywhere you put it, whether on scroll, processed trees, or on glass surfaces.
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See, Mr. Kinsley, I wrote this for the INTERNET. The last time I checked, it was over 2,000 words long, with encrustations aplenty. Here, on the Internet, I can do whatever I want. No editor I’ve ever come across in a couple of decades of newspapering would let me get away with writing an article this long for a newspaper. I would have been cut off at the first tangent.