Roger Hodge
Every year hundreds of magazine editors congregate in one or another New York City conference center to pass judgment on thousands of stories, essays, columns, special issues, photo essays, videos, punning headlines, and gorgeously produced service packages. Each editor arrives at the National Magazine Awards judging session with a singular set of prejudices, biases, grudges, and agendas—we’re only humans, after all—but also hoping to discover new stories, new magazines, and perhaps some subtle indication of how our own entries might be faring in the room next door. Over the last several years, as the American Society of Magazine Editors has moved to embrace new platforms and modes of publishing, the digital transformation of the industry has been much on our minds. This year the separate print and digital categories were almost but not entirely eliminated.
Despite years of moans and lamentations about the state of the magazine industry, anxiety over job security, dwindling fees, vanishing expense accounts, and the ever-encroaching menace of Facebook, writers once again, even in 2016, somehow found the resources to report and write; editors managed to edit amid the cacophony of open-plan offices; and all the other indispensable players in the quality-lit game—designers, photo editors, fact-checkers, copy editors, researchers, publicists, interns, and ad salespeople—got their jobs done as well. And by some miracle we managed to find a readership for our more ambitious articles even though people insist on reading our products on their smartphones.
I have a confession. This year I, too, did most of my magazine reading on a screen, often a small handheld one, lost in the digital garden of forking paths, moving from one link to another, and occasionally finding myself back at The Intercept, the web-site where I spend the labor of my days. Most of my newspaper reading occurred on a screen as well, and who really can distinguish newspapers from magazines anymore? A good chunk of my book reading also scrolled by on a (slightly larger) screen, so I suppose I’ve gone fully native. Back in the old days, which weren’t so very long ago, during the first round of judging, ASME used to send us a large box of magazines to review. Some of those issues—like a special painted box-head containing unbound McSweeny’s articles—are still collecting dust somewhere in my house, perched atop back issues of the Oxford American and Lapham’s Quarterly. Then came the flash drive stuffed with entries that arrived in a FedEx envelope. Now we simply receive a login for a (somewhat slow) server loaded with PDFs. No iPad, laptop, or phone can compete with the pure tactile pleasure of flipping through the September issue of a glossy fashion magazine, however, and when we convened at Columbia University this year for judging, we all enthusiastically indulged our sadly neglected paper fetishes.
Like many other editors and literary types I used to fret over the fate of what we now call “longform,” deeply reported narrative features and investigative reports that resist screen-friendly surgical-strike word counts. Yet this year I happily read on my phone Kathryn Shultz’s “The Really Big One,” a wonderfully scary 6,000-word feature on the coming destruction of the Pacific Northwest by earthquake, while standing on a Q train to Manhattan, trying not to think about how vulnerable my own city is to natural disasters. Instapaper informed me that it was a twenty-five-minute read, which perfectly matched my typical commute. I shuddered in amazement as I read on my two-inch screen about Goldfinger the seismologist watching on his two-inch screen the Tohoku tsunami roll in, and then I wondered how anyone could possibly remain living in the Cascadia inundation zone after reading Shultz’s article. But then, I thought, where would those millions of people go?
It’s kind of like the situation facing millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States who live under a constant threat of deportation. Not under the hypothetical threat of a President Trump but in the here and now, from a liberal Democratic president who has presided over the most efficient deportation regime in American history. I missed Luke Mogelson’s “The Deported” when it first appeared in the New York Times Magazine, so when I saw it on the projected table of contents for Best American Magazine Writing 2016 I pulled it up on my phone; it was a thirty-four-minute read. I had just edited a similar piece, one about refugees from gang violence in El Salvador who would surely be murdered if they were denied asylum and sent back but who almost certainly will be so denied. In his story, Mogelson follows a man who was denied asylum and deported to Honduras and who now must live separated from his children. In Honduras, Mogelson meets others, also deported, who have no choice but to risk once again the perilous journey north, where the odds of even making the passage through Mexico have grown ever longer. One man, named Abraham, said he had been deported from Mexico seven times on his way to the United States, imprisoned by the Zetas cartel, threatened with castration and death, enslaved for eight months. Yet he said he had no choice; he would eventually brave the trains once again.
People who have no choice simply do what they must. The migrant workers in BuzzFeed’s “The New American Slavery” thought they were avoiding the dangers of illegal immigration when they signed up for a guest-worker program, entering the United States on H-2 visas. They didn’t want to end up as anonymous crosses on a map, data points among the thousands who have died in the Chihuahua and Sonora deserts of the American Southwest. Instead, as Jessica Garrison, Ken Bensinger, and Jeremy Singer-Vine document in their powerful investigation, they found themselves enslaved and abused in southern Louisiana. That was a thirty-five-minute read.
Other characters who appear in this volume, more fortunate by an accident of birth or geography, face conflicts and challenges that are no less mortal, and take significant actions that when rendered into prose yield writing of the highest caliber. I’m thinking particularly of “The Friend,” by Matthew Teague, a story of uncommon devotion and extraordinary suffering. I don’t recommend reading “The Friend” on the subway or in a cafe if you’d rather not be seen weeping in public.
“How it Feels,” by Jenny Zhang, is a seventeen-minute read that feels like a nail in the skull, a punch in the solar plexus, a shot in the heart. Read that powerful essay about depression and then read “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” about a young woman who some policemen bullied into recanting her statement that she’d been raped at knifepoint. She was then prosecuted for the crime of making a false statement to police. Then maybe read Cosmopolitan’s disturbing seventeen-minute report on the antiabortion clinics, a.k.a. pregnancy centers, that are popping up all over the country and Joshua Hammer’s thirty-six-minute story about Ebola in Sierra Leone. These are extraordinary, powerful works of journalism, and now you hold them all in your hand, lucky reader, whether on paper or projected on glass and conjured out of photons, in this remarkably useful example of reading technology known as a book.
Not everything in this collection is so deadly serious; we magazine types like to laugh as well as cry and tear our hair in righteous anger at the injustices of the world. Barrett Brown’s three essays, published in The Intercept, proceed from personal injustice and arrive at a kind of sublime universal comedy that is very rare indeed. I read each of those ten-minute essays aloud to my wife as I cried with laughter shortly after they arrived in my office—handwritten, on paper, from Barrett’s prison cell in Texas, where he’s serving time as a political prisoner on trumped up federal charges because the FBI and the DOJ didn’t like his journalism. Those who have no choice simply do what they must.
One of the more irritating factoids of our digital age is the idea that no one will read longish, deeply reported articles on the Internet, much less on their phones. Of course, there’s no question that short, clicky posts are more likely to go viral and generate huge traffic numbers, but there’s also good evidence that readers engage more substantively with longer pieces, even on mobile. In May, for example, the Pew Research Center released a study finding that readers spend twice as much time with longer articles than with shorter ones, 123 seconds compared with 57 seconds. That doesn’t sound like a long time, I admit, but wait! The report was based on Parse.ly data, which measure engagement based on screen movements in 5.5 second intervals, and the study’s authors have good reasons for concluding that the actual time readers spend with articles is probably much longer.
The data on reader engagement are still pretty crude, despite the ubiquity of digital surveillance. The main point is that readers spend significantly more time with longer pieces—more than twice as much!—which is good news for editors and writers who are committed to producing groundbreaking investigations and telling complex stories.
One thing that the Parse.ly data do not capture is the use of “Read Later” apps such as Instapaper and Pocket. Personally, I almost always save longer articles to Instapaper, and I did so with every single article that appears in this book. I made a folder called ASME and filed them all away to read at my leisure. Sometimes that meant I gave up some cool graphics and illustrations, but in the case of Paul Ford’s magisterial 131-minute, 35,000-word, issue-long “What Is Code?” article from Bloomberg Businessweek, easily the single most awesome piece of magazine journalism that appeared in 2015, I did occasionally pop back into Chrome on my laptop so I could enjoy the original as it was intended, gifs and all. By the way, I subscribe to the paper magazine, and that piece was better on a screen.
Unsurprisingly, in the inane controversies over longform and digital reading and so forth, it helps to take the long view, as the novelist Paul La Farge pointed out recently in a thoughtful eleven-minute essay in Nautilus, “The Deep Space of Digital Reading.” People haven’t always read in the same way, and every new “platform,” from papyrus to illuminated manuscript to printed folio to mass-market paperback, has elicited almost verbatim alarums. La Farge didn’t mention it in his essay, but the highly literate slave owners of ancient Athens typically enjoyed their scrolls as they were read aloud by slaves, and Plato’s Socrates more than once pretends to worry that the habit of writing would ruin people’s memories because they were no longer required to memorize the epic poems of the Homeric tradition. (Plato, the greatest prose writer of antiquity, is probably engaging in a bit of satire there, by the way.) St. Augustine famously reports, in his Confessions, that he was stunned to see his teacher Ambrose reading silently in 384 AD, without moving his lips, and reading remained an oral activity well into the medieval period and beyond. Reading silently, according to historians and cognitive scientists, set off a transformation of human consciousness. As La Farge puts it, “When the reading brain becomes able to process written symbols automatically, the thinking brain, the I, has time to go beyond those symbols, to develop itself and the culture in which it lives.” As a highly sophisticated reader and writer, La Farge isn’t terribly impressed with the legions of pessimists who see in our latest technological revolution the advent of a permanent shallowing of culture as the “endless, mesmerizing buzz” of the Internet renders us all into irredeemable idiots.
No uncritical digital cheerleader, La Farge recognizes the downsides of digital culture as well as anyone, but he’s skeptical of claims that we’ve expelled ourselves from a readerly paradise. He observes, for instance, that the studies showing people are less able to comprehend material they’ve read on a screen are quite likely cultural artifacts rather than brute facts. We’re in the midst of a big transition, after all, and though it’s undeniably irritating to see phone drones rudely stumbling around ignoring their children and blocking the aisles of grocery stores, at least they’re reading something. Social mores just haven’t caught up yet, and pretty soon the good old-fashioned cultural mechanism known as shame will kick in and people will learn to mind their manners again. Then our publishing Cassandras can be counted upon to lament the decline in digital reading, but until then, thanks for all the page views!