Long-Form Journalism Reborn

I never bought the notion that long-form was dead, but everything's hip for the moment on the Internet. Now, long-form essays are hip again. Demand is driven, paradoxically, by a backlash against instant gratification short-form technology (tweets, social networking, etc.) At the Independent UK, "The long-form resurrection: Will snappy websites kill off lengthy magazine reads?":

Last summer, the editor-in-chief of technology magazine Wired wrote and ran a cover story declaring, "The Web is Dead". A year earlier, the then managing editor of Time.com had rung the death knell on long-form reportage journalism. Wired's Chris Anderson claimed that newer, better ways to use the internet – apps, say – were pushing the conventional web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox et al) into terminal decline. Time's Josh Tyrangiel argued that the culture of rapid-fire news on the internet meant that Time magazine's distinctive essays were just "too long" to work on its website. In his view, the web had rendered the entire form obsolete.

Now, judging by an emerging online trend, both theories seem to have awkwardly mutated to produce a wobbly, exciting new truth: narrative journalism, the kind of expertly crafted piece that sprawls over thousands of words and swallows up a whole lunchtime to read, is far from dead. Thanks to nifty advances in technology (smartphones, tablets, ebook readers) it is undergoing a major revival on the internet. Classic writers of the genre – such as Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson – are now filtering through to a new, fast-growing audience.

In his 1972 New York magazine essay, "The Birth of the New Journalism" (available now at Instapaper), Tom Wolfe described the form as a "discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would... read like a novel". He, and Gay Talese (whose 15,000 word, 1966 Esquire piece, "Frank Sinatra has a cold", is considered one of the best long-form profile pieces ever written) "never guessed for a minute that the work they would do over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature's main event". Which, at its peak – particularly in the US, where the tradition really took hold – it almost certainly did. But this form of novelistic investigation has been in serious decline for the past decade. Long-form always takes considerable time and money – investments the print industry now finds it increasingly tricky to sustain. So, why the resurgent interest? Can it really all be down to more efficient ways of using the internet? Well, yes and no.

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