By Neila Matheny
Last week, I attended the PRSA/Churchill Club event “Journalism After Print.” The panel had diverse backgrounds in blogging, traditional journalism, online news, and analysis of the publishing industry. With these varying viewpoints, the discussion was lively, but focused and informative. Moderated by Sam Whitmore, one of the topics the panel discussed the most was the future of long-form journalism.
Ken Doctor, a panelist and an affiliate analyst with Outsell, Inc., mentioned that he estimates there were one million less stories written in 2009 than there were in 2007. In a matter of just two years, that sort of a drop is staggering. With the emphasis on click rates, breaking news before it is all over Twitter, and having journalists balance a variety of job responsibilities, it seems long-form journalism has been impacted the most by the top in story writing.
Publications like Rolling Stone, Forbes, and Fortune still seem committed to the effort, but the flip side has seen the end of Conde Nast’s Portfolio and the shrinking of print pages all over the industry. Is it the end of long-form journalism or is it time to re-define what it means?
Is crowd-sourced content like this New York Times piece how long-form journalism will survive in the online world? Will epic Wikipedia posts like this page on the recent earthquake in Haiti be the new way for consumers to find in-depth information on a given subject? How will journalism curriculum be adjusted to teach young journalists about the changes the online world has forced on their craft?
All of these questions were pondered by the panelists, but there was no clear agreement about the future long-form journalism. Even if long-form journalism is a rarity, I believe there is still a place for it in publishing. Would you like to share your thoughts on the future of long-form journalism? Please add a comment below.
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