Who's going to write it? How about the writers for The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Wilson Quarterly, The Economist, The Paris Review, etc. I could fill up the length of a long-form article with names of publications that have long-form writing.
The real question is, who's going to pay for it? This is like when someone complains that there aren't any good programmers out there, and, P.S., they're paying $25k a year. The article talks about 2000-3000 word articles. At the rate Tumblr's paying, that's $80-$120 per article. Who are they kidding? At those rates, if you're an established writer, you're better off posting to a personal blog and relying on ad revenue.
There have been a few magazines (both online and print) that have recently managed to establish themselves as reputable publications that have good writing. What they've done is pay above-market rates to attract good writers. After all, why would you publish in some no name publication instead of The Atlantic? Tumblr seems to be using the opposite strategy.
I spent 4 years freelance writing long-form narrative journalism stories for a foreign magazine, and let me tell you that I wouldn't even consider getting out of the house for less than $1500 per story + expenses. And that's for a short one.
(Oh, and I find Harper's to be the king of general-interest magazines.)
I have some questions about freelancing as it pertains to writing long-form journalism.
Would it be alright if I sent you them via email? My email is stevenj134@gmail.com. Or if you leave your email I'll contact you. Would really appreciate it.
Like stevenj I would also love you hear from you how do you go about freelancing long form in today's day and age. Would greatly appreciate if you drop a line at hardik84 [at] gmail
Well, the founder of Lapham's, Lewis Lapham, was previously the editor for Harper's, so that's something else you might want to check out.
However, I feel that Lapham's is unique in that it picks a single topic for an issue, and then goes into great depth on that topic by interleaving primary sources and analysis.
Lapham's Quarterly is unique, and a pleasure to read and hold, but, to be fair, I wouldn't really call it a magazine. But Lewis Lapham has certainly made Harper's into the most interesting, subversive, funny and whimsical high-brow general interest magazine in circulation. The last few issues, though, have taken a slight dip in quality, so I'm following it with some concern.
Like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, and unlike the Atlantic or the NYT Magazine, Harper's prefers on-the-ground reporting over covering "issues" or "trends". But the writing quality in Harper's tends to be much superior to that of both the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Harper's best features are usually non-mainstream, and even intentionally bizarre stories.
To get a taste of Harper's, take a look at their regular science column, which I find hilarious. Here's the last one: http://harpers.org/archive/2012/10/0084112.
I post it to HN every month but it never gets more than a few votes...
The Baffler is great, but has mostly cultural analysis pieces and almost no original reporting. I think N+1 resembles pretentious college publications, and frankly I find it quite boring, though I may give it another look.
Agreed. You could easily find writers for 3000 words articles if you were willing to pay enough to be worth the writer's time that is spent on researching and writing the article.
Look at BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post's strategies (at least for reporters and news, not for the entertainment parts of their site). They quickly managed to establish themselves by luring big names who people would want to read. It's probably near-impossible to quickly do the reverse.
>Who's going to write it? How about the writers for The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Wilson Quarterly, The Economist, The Paris Review, etc. I could fill up the length of a long-form article with names of publications that have long-form writing.
Aren't those guys already writing for those outlets?
Plus, I don't know much about the others, but the Atlantic went from a high quality outlet I've followed for decades, to a lower quality rag, after Bradley lost most of the stuff in 2005. It's online presence, now, is even more abysmal, for people who value good journalism and the old Atlantic.
All I really want from journalists is the information that most of us are too lazy or busy to collect. I want them to make phone calls, speak to insiders, cross reference public statements with available records, generally make a nuisance of themselves until they have some new insights to bring to light.
Most times though it seems they're barely doing any more research than what went into a well received HN comment. Except some articles are padded out with details of what the reporter is having for lunch during the interview... I've got no idea why that type of writing is in demand. I'd rather read a flat transcript in most cases.
I'd go a bit further than that - I think the most important work for professional journalists involves doing things most of us are too scared to do.
Would you get out your camera and start taking photos after My Lai? Be willing to wear being on Nixon's enemies list as a badge of honor? Uncover police corruption? Be shot while working foreign correspondence? Go undercover in the Ku Klux Klan? Publish information about a corporation after they've given you a cease and desist?
Maybe you would. And I'd like to think I would too sitting here in the comfort of my office feeling principled, but I'm not sure that means much.
And it doesn't even have to be about really significant stuff. For example our local paper had a story recently about a new website for one of the city services. No mention of:
a) What it cost.
b) Why it was 12 months late (based on deadline in original RFP).
c) Why key requirements specified in the original RFP were not implemented.
I mean if I wanted to just read the city's one-sided press release, I would do that.
And the paper wonders why nobody subscribes to the print version anymore.
More newsworthy would be if it actually came in as promsed, on time and under budget. Only the Onion seems interested in breaking real news like that, however.
At work, we recently put out a press release on some technology we had developed. I got to witness first-hand how so much of the online publishing world is just a slightly rearranged copy of the press release. Depressing.
"Journalist" has somehow mutated into "Blogging" and "Live streams", with a page hit, view count, ad revenue pumping machine that tries to incinerate whatever relics remain.
I agree with your notion of "journalist". A rebranding of the burnt name may be in order. I like the idea of calling those who practice the craft Detectives.
I think eventually the pendulum will swing and information density will start to come to the fore a bit more. The aggregation & internal-link architecture approaches are just gaming the advertising industry and will eventually die out (a bit).
This is a strange article. I say strange because Sarah Lacy hasn't seem to look into what "New Yorker style" prose / stories look or feel like. The New Yorker is not only a publisher of journalism. It also does short stories, serializations, and I generally consider it an incubator of literary thoughts, methods, and practices the way YCombinator is an incubator of entrepreneurship.
Raymond Carver, JD Salinger, Alice Munroe, Vladimir Nabokov, VS Naipaul, Dorothy Parker, Philip Roth among others.
I don't know if Sarah has looked through the some New Yorker Magazines and actually read the stories.
Who's going to found those startups that YCombinator is looking for? Those dedicated, driven, individuals and teams with a single-minded focus to creating a service, a company, a product that people will pay for.
Who's going to write New Yorker style stories? Those driven, single-minded, not-immediate-money-driven and creative individuals and teams (writer/editor teams, etc) who will do whatever it takes to push forward the written form.
But of course, writing the truth never bought anyone any favours with advertisers.
What makes it stranger is that this story is appearing in a publication, identifying an unserved market, without any hint that they themselves would publish exactly what they say is missing. That is a story I'd like to read, and I might even click on a Pando link to read it.
Journalism and creative writing are not the same thing. Journalism of the form found in the New Yorker requires financial investment, in the form of funding travel, and in the form of funding full-time fact checking.
Also, if you think that startups are not-immediate-money-driven, I would disagree.
Perhaps the model of full-time fact checking needs to change?
I've been a fact checker at a magazine. My job consisted of calling sources up, and asking them each line of identifiable facts - to see if they actually said this, or whether this person's birth date is actually x month, y day, z year. Whether the moon really was waxing on this time of this month like the writer said in the article. Whether Nasa did publish this photo on this day, and where?
I'd say make mandatory fact checking a prerequisite of the writer's submission. All forms of public/recordable and fact-checkable (inventing a new word here) resource must be recorded, logged, delivered in electronic form for searching and listening.
For those cases where you can't keep these records, you won't be able to "fact-check" them anyway.
For actual facts and events, historical records, etc - I'd say we have a whole internet that is waiting to connect us with the actual people who it happened to. Use skype to call direct contacts, heck, I'd even support the New York Times creating their own verified wiki. Fork wikipedia and create a journalism-standard wiki.
I can't believe that the NYT hasn't actually done this yet. It's so obvious - they have teams of people on fact-checking duty. Create places where these facts that are gathered don't just disappear into the air after this issue is printed. Keep everything. With the cost of electronic storage so cheap, I highly believe that we can keep every single fact that we check, together with references and probabilities of accuracy and correctness (ie this factoid came from a scientist, maybe it's true. But now, I have found this paper that shows these equations and has been peer reviewed by these additional scientists and debated by these media and these researchers, then perhaps I can rate this to be more believable than just what the scientist said.)
These are all doable things with the amount of resources we have.
If you just kept an eye out for recent updates and looked to see who had added them you could totally beat someone to a scoop. Or am I missing something?
You could, but if each "Question" was only one specific fact, and the people asking were anonomised and time-order-randomised then you would have to do a lot of heavy lifting to get the scoop. Plus if you published a 'scoop' ahead of the facts being checked, and one of the 'facts' ended up being bogus, then it wouldn't be any better than repeating a press release or re-blogging someone else's story.
that's why I put not-immediate-money driven in the "writers" section, not the ycombinator/startup section. reading?
Yes journalism and creative writing are not the same - so why did the article refer to them as "New Yorker style"? My goal in my comment was to point out that for many New Yorker style pieces of writing, journalism and creative writing blends and cross polinates at that level - for example, Ernest Hemmingway is probably one of the best know "creative writing" novelists - but he is also a journalist for the Toronto Star churning out war stories day in day out. Why does the New Yorker always seem to have the most well written articles and a more nuanced team of editors? Perhaps because the editors don't treat journalism and creative writing any different from the viewpoint of standards.
Any good piece of publishable journalism must stand on its own as a piece of creative non-fiction as well. The writer must be writing creatively, as well as journalistically. We're not trying to fill an about.com article here, neither are we writing a blurb that will go in tomorrow's paper.
That's how you get Pulitzer winning articles. And that's what's missing in the popular debate about long-form journalism.
Everyone talks about journalism, the gathering of news, the interviews. No one talks about advancing the state of writing, using a new point of view in writing about the news, using different words, tenses, perspectives, metaphors and writing techniques. Even though many people want to divorce the two, they go together, hand in hand.
Textual journalism without the skill of writing is boring. And we have a lot of boring writers out there.
Sara's article just pointed that out. She should learn to write better :)
In our recent reader survey almost every
respondent answered why they read PandoDaily
with a variation of the following: Long form
content that isn’t afraid to call out powerful people.
The Internet is still a leveling bitch on dysfunctional industries. This is hardly a free-for-all; readers will only read long form content, if it’s excellent.
I think the major change with the advent the internet is that since one can publish so easily, one cannot count on the presence of an editor to help with things like eliminating stray commas which alter the meaning of one's sentences.
Isn't that a job for a copy editor? A nice thing to have a but a good regular editor is more important.
But I did wonder while reading the piece what Pando Daily's editorial setup is like. Does it bear any resemblance to the process she went through earlier in her career?
"... readers will only read long-form content, and that only if it is excellent."
(Forgive me if my usage of that is no longer current. It has been quite a while since I've spent an extended period of time with current formal writing.) The intended meaning was probably something like this:
"... readers will only put the effort into reading long-form content if it is excellent."
Now that I've actually finished the article (heh), I think it's asking a very good question.
What she's really saying is:
1) Readers want good long-form articles
2) Some sites are even willing to pay for it
3) But, there are no longer up-and-comers being trained to produce such work, there are only the writers who already have the experience.
What she's saying is not all that different from the complaint you see about hiring developers- Everyone wants someone with 5 years experience, but there's a lack of opportunities for people to get that 5 years experience.
I think that's an exaggerated complaint in the software industry, but maybe not as much in the journalism biz.
I worked in local TV journalism for about five years; an industry thrashing around to find its new footing to be sure. There are very few people there who are willing to do serious journalism. They don't know how to Google, or who to call. Many of those fresh out of college simply have no curiosity, and little imagination.
It's not unusual to talk to some and find out their dreams of being the next Oprah or Brian Williams. (I'm not knocking those people or celebrities mind you. Even then often the reporters don't realize the work and dedication those people put into their craft. They just know success when they see it.) These people are chasing the popular respect, popularity in culture, and money. Of course, not all. Just many.
There are some people who really do have an interest in the work. I say this as a producer with five years experience, who has been looking for a job just over a year now[0]. The three times interviews with top 80 markets have gone far enough to talk money the offers were around $20k. I'm going to have to take the next job like this offered to me.
[0] I lost my last job because I visited 4chan. My boss said the news wires we subscribed too had enough information, and there was no excuse to try to look at the site myself. Therefor, I was obviously going to look at porn. Which I assume there were thumbnails of on my harddrive.
I've mostly applied for other producer positions at TV stations. I've also applied for news writer positions and just a couple of journalism jobs in print/Internet media.
If you're asking what I was looking for money wise? I was in a market around 150 (DMA rank), in a city that was very cheap to live in. I had student loans of $800/month, and I'd like to be able to pay them, afford rent, water, power, food, and an Internet connection. I managed that in a cheap city with a roommate at 30k, so I'd like to make more in a larger city, given I have five years experience producing and five in the studio.
Which do you think unlikely? Me finding another job at all, or me finding a job that pays a wage approaching middle class?
A few different times they popped up in the news over the years I went there to get a feel for why people were joining in any certain cause, (yes, mostly for the fun of it), and often to find out exactly what they were doing.
Probably the best example is around Christmas 2010. People were pissed that credit card companies were not processing payments towards Wikileaks. There were tons of posts about taking down their websites (and arguments for Amazon). Of course, it did eventually happen, and while I was at work. It's not some major earth shattering story for a local newscast, but, it's easy to get.
Yes, a lot of the actual goings on of some of the operations are smaller clandestine groups on IRC and the likes, and I'd love to work my way into one or two of those. But a lot of them do rely on populist support, be it from actual outrage or potential for schadenfreude. A lot of wire copy is just "secret hacker group!"
It's not like I browsed it nightly lying in wait or anything. But it was in my history, and I when asked I told my boss that yes, I'd visited it. As I started to go into why, he stops me and tells me the company can't have people visiting these kinds of sites, etc... Had I been smarter, I could've made a better defense, like asking to be shown the offending material.
At first I was angry, depressed, and all kinds of other things. Now, I genuinely think it was just a case of wanting to get rid of someone, and look for a way to fire someone without paying them. I don't take it as personally. I don't think he thought I was trying to do anything untoward at work. (I mean, it's not like I didn't have a bigger monitor and privacy(!) at home... And if I was, why wouldn't I use Privacy Mode, or at least erase the history and cache?) I don't know. Just a bad situation.
I know several people who are amazingly talented writers who've been unable to find paying work. Writing prose is sort-of like software, in that you can get a lot of practice in before you ever get a job, but it's hard to prove that your practice was valuable until you've had a few years of professional experience.
This is the wrong approach. You don't train someone to produce such works.
These types of proses are more like a personal distillation of experiences. You can take a handful of olympic athletes, pair them up with a great editor and writer team, and come up with a great story about what happened at the london olympics. That would be a cover worthy story.
It's not about training writers who can churn out articles. It's about understanding that writing itself is an art, not something that can be trained, but something that needs to be invented.
Put it in terms that people on hacker news would probably understand - Writing a major New Yorker cover story is like finding the topic, writing, and then defending a PhD thesis. You have to come up with an original thought, support it with research and original experimentation, distill it down, test your hypothesis, and see if your thesis is still solid. After rounds and rounds of editing, repositioning, rewriting, and PIVOTING, you come out with a kernel of an article - the amount of words written would be approx 10 - 20 times the amount of text that would actually be published. The rest would be research material and stuff "left on the editing table".
You can't train that. Successful authors understand this - all of their advice to young writers would include something like - "only you know what kind of story you want to write" - "keep practicing" "keep writing every day".
There is no handbook to learn, no school to go to.
Journalism school gives you a template of what other people have done, but at the same time, I consider it a waste of time for writers. Just go out there experience the world, talk to as many people as you can, and write seriously every single day. You'll come out the other side with a comparable set of skills as someone who went to school for journalism.
---
So what is the right approach? For me, it would be encouragement - start young - get education right. Bring up childhood and adult literacy, give people the ability to think and reason. Increase funding to schools and give teachers a better deal.
You'll find more and more kids wanting to write, keep practicing it, and thus we get better writers when they grow up.
For the immediate situation, the same thing applies - give people who want to write the chance to tell their story. Increase funding commitments to schools and higher education.
Get people talking about writing as an actual practice instead of as an advertising technique (ie writing copy) or as a purely legalistic/procedural language (ie taxes, lawsuits, and manuals).
People will become more interested in writing and the skills required in literacy.
Who knows, the best story might be hiding there in the heart of that guy you pass by every day living on the streets.
I think you're painting all of writers with a single brush. I just can't imagine that a good understanding of the basics (which can be taught out of school, but should always be taught in school) doesn't help most people in their art. And we know that not all people learn the same way.
I didn't go to journalism school. I don't even have a degree. (I dropped out of CompSci.) But I did work in news for five years (I pointed that out in another post. I know, it's starting to sound smarmy. Sorry.), and the vast majority of people did go to school for journalism.
I disagree with the general tone of your post. I regret not going to school for this. I think it would've made me an even more capable writer than I am now. That said, I do think that a slim majority of people I've met who did attend aren't great writers. As a TV news producer I spent a fair amount of time editing others' work and working with my reporters to help them better communicate what they mean. I often felt that some of the things we talked about were not only things probably covered in college, but some were definitely covered in grade school. I met an adult (well, a 22yo, which I consider an adult,) who had trouble with their/there/they're.
At least one person actually stopped seeking input from me after they found out I didn't attend school in the field.
And then I've met a few people, who also attended college, who could write circles around, well, any other people I've ever met. On in particular credits his school, and a couple of professors and friends he met there. He has no trouble being published when he takes the time to write something, but just prefers being on TV.
I think that some students better know how to take advantage of what schools provide, and that some schools, in their current form, aren't teaching. Both allude to problems that need to be addressed, but neither suggests to me that schools are completely worthless. Instead it says to me that some schools are really ineffective for the students they haveand that should be addressed, and we need to try to make sure all students know how to utilize the resources available to them.
That said, I think your second section is dead on. We do need to be better about encouraging people to tackle fields that interest them. School shouldn't be some thing that people feel labored by. I think that's why so many are ineffective, not proof they can't work.
Funny. For the past few years, I've been an avid evangelist of the articles written by both New Yorker and Vanity Fair (I'm not seeing any references to this one in the article or here in the comments. Don't balk at the name or genre, they have some of the very best feature articles on the most random topics that I have ever come across). People called me crazy.
The Economist has been mentioned here in the comments, but while good, it does not compare in terms of length and sheer quality to the offerings by these two. Apples and oranges, really.
Even in print, there is only one NewYorker. There are some other mags that are almost comparable, but it's not like there are scores of them to choose from.
And how exactly does longform help websites advance their dodgey advertising tactics?
It's just my opinion but I honestly think writing on the web was better in the 1990's. These type of websites would likely be criticized today as "walls of text" and for not having enough JavaScript or using enough of the latest CSS or HTML features.
The more interesting question to me is the relationship between talented journalists and website developers. They do not necessarily see the world the same way. They operate from different models.
What if salaried journalists committed to the craft of writing (not pandering to advertisers or search engines) had the technological empowerment to build high speed, highly organised distribution (publishing) systems without the need to consult with web developers and accept developers' dreams of dodgey pay by the click web advertising? Do I believe there is a disconnect between the two groups? Yes.
There are still middlemen in publishing. They are just new middlemen. Alas, they can't afford to pay salaries as their predecessors could.
Perhaps what needs to be taught is the technical skill so that ageing journalists schooled in long form can cut out the middleman, start their own publishing businesses and hire the top talent to train the young people entering the field.
The idea is good i.e. teach journalists to hack.
But there's a conflict of interest. Look who's doing the teaching. Mozilla and Google are in business together.
Mozilla != journalists
Mozilla == web developers == middleman
FAIL. (It's been tried before: Web developers purporting to "help" journalists. The results have not been good.)
I'm glad you are not offended by my remarks. It may seem like I'm taking a shot at developers or Mozilla. As a user who hates bloated web browsers and Java, maybe I am. But from an objective viewpoint, I'm not. I'm just saying journalists and developers have as yet not been able to find common ground, even though they both know they need each other. Something is amiss.
Meanwhile solid journalism is deteriorating.
As for me, I am taking action, but at a lower level. The stuff I'm working on is much bigger than page views, pay per click, or even news. I'm interested in software that can alter paradigms. I want to see the original version of the internet. No middlemen.
On the topic of "who is going to pay for this?!" it's really just a matter of time. This article really strikes a nerve with me because, while I was majoring in English, I questioned the whole point of publishers in today's world. What do I need a publisher for these days? What do I need a record label for? Surely I can just post my content on the internet and presto, right?
I forgot what the value of publishing was. Fast forward to today and the noise of content-farming and SEO keyword-stuffing is deafening.
And on the topic of long form, rarely have I ever gained anything from 500 words.
Observation: If you're going to write long-form content, use a serif font designed for reading. Changing the font from ars-marquette-web to Georgia immediately and drastically reduced the headache I got when reading this article.
I would guess that the median New Yorker staff writer gets more like $150-200k, all in (when you add up magazine fees + book advances + speaking fees.) The mean is much higher, because a handful of outliers (heh, Gladwell) make $1 million plus.
They definitely meant journalism as written for the New Yorker magazine, it's generally considered to be one of the best publications out there for long form, investigative journalism.
In the first couple paragraphs..."Simply put: It was easy and cheap for a lot of other players on the Web to outdo daily newspaper journalism for cheap or free."
But her point is that investigative journalism like that seen in the New Yorker won't convert to free web content as easily.
The real question is, who's going to pay for it? This is like when someone complains that there aren't any good programmers out there, and, P.S., they're paying $25k a year. The article talks about 2000-3000 word articles. At the rate Tumblr's paying, that's $80-$120 per article. Who are they kidding? At those rates, if you're an established writer, you're better off posting to a personal blog and relying on ad revenue.
There have been a few magazines (both online and print) that have recently managed to establish themselves as reputable publications that have good writing. What they've done is pay above-market rates to attract good writers. After all, why would you publish in some no name publication instead of The Atlantic? Tumblr seems to be using the opposite strategy.