Jon Stahl's Journal

Some interesting thoughts from Gerald Marzorati, the editor of the New York Times Magazine (highlights are mine):

Q. Thank you for answering questions. I believe that the Magazine is one of the great weekly publications for in-depth, intelligent reporting on a wide variety of timely issues. The New Yorker comes to mind as another print source in this genre as well. Do you think this kind of reporting can survive in this day of Internet blurbs and sound-bite news? I have to admit that I face less and less time to be able to sit down and read entire articles as I scramble at work and at home with busy schedules and an overload of information.

A. Dear Mr. Langs: My short answer is, Maybe. Long-form journalism might have a future, both in print and online. Last spring I gave an address on this very subject to a gathering of editors in San Francisco, and you can read it if you want here. But I will summarize:

— Readers still want long-form journalism — despite information overload and hectic schedules and so on — and the numbers prove it. It’s the magazine’s longest pieces that get the most page views each week, often more than a million. (Are they reading it on their monitors or printing it out? Good question.)

— Long -form journalism is expensive: The Magazine is publishing a 13,000-word piece on Sunday (it will be up online earlier) that we did in partnership with ProPublica, the independent, not-for-profit newsroom. One of ProPublica’s editors and I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation yesterday of what the total cost of the piece actually was, figuring in several years of reporting and nearly a year of editing. Estimate: $400,000.

— So: The problem is NOT that contemporary readers getting more and more of their news online don’t want or read long-form journalism, despite what my friends Jacob Weisberg and Michael Massing continue to say (see “The News About the Internet,” New York Review of Books, Aug. 13, 2009). The problem is that very, very few Web outlets can begin to afford it. And the the handful of print magazines devoted to long-form journalism that have a Web presence (The New Yorker and The Atlantic most prominently) don’t really make money. Who is going to pay for long-form journalism? That’s the question. Maybe we need more ProPublicas. Maybe you and other readers drawn to long-form need to pay for online content.

Tags: journalism