I have had it with long-form journalism. By which I mean—don’t get me wrong—I’m fed up with the term long-form itself, a label that the people who create and sell magazines now invariably, and rather solemnly, apply to the work you will find in these pages. Reader, do you feel enticed to read a story by the distinction that it is long? Or does your heart not sink just a little? Would you feel drawn to a movie or a book simply because it is long? (“Oooh—you should really read Moby-Dick—it’s super long.”) Editors presumably care about words as much as anyone, so it is particularly mysterious that they would choose to promote their work by ballyhooing one of its less inherently appealing attributes. Do we call certain desserts “solid-fat-form food” or do we call them cakes and pies? Is baseball a long-form sport? Okay, sure—but would Major League Baseball ever promote it as that?
This choice of words matters, I think, not only because of the false note it sounds about stories like these but also because of the message it sends to the world about magazines’ ambitions these days. The term long-form has come to stand for magazine journalism during the same period—over the past twenty years, and particularly the past ten—that magazines have had, as the politicians say, some challenges. I think this wrong turn in our taxonomy is a sign of, and may even contribute to, the continuing commercial upheaval and crisis in confidence. The story of the transition from an industry that was within memory so exuberant and ambitious—so grandiose, really, in its conception of its cultural and societal role—that it could declare itself to be inventing a “New Journalism,” to an industry wringing its hands over preserving something called “long-form journalism,” does not sound like a long-form story with a happy ending. It certainly doesn’t sound like one I’d want read, much less live through. “New Journalism” is a stirring promise to the wider world; “long-form” is the mumbled incantation of a decaying priesthood.
And, in the digital age, making a virtue of mere length sends the wrong message to writers as well as readers. For when you don’t have to print words on pages and then bundle the pages together and stick postage stamps on the result, you slip some of the constraints that have enforced excellence (and provided polite excuses for editors to trim fat) since Johannes Gutenberg began printing books. You no longer have to make that agonizing choice of the best example from among three or four—you can freely use them all. More adjectives? Why not? As a magazine writer, I used to complain that my editors would cut out all my great color, just to make the story fit; as an editor, I now realize that, yes, they had to make my stories fit and, no, that color wasn’t so great. The editors were working to preserve the stuff that would make the story go, to make sure the story earned every incremental word, in service to the reader. Long-form, on the Web, is in danger of meaning merely “a lot of words.”
This is a particularly ripe moment to rethink our terminology because deeply reported narrative and essayistic journalism is suddenly all the rage. Far from fading away, it shows signs of an energy and imagination not seen since the heyday of New Journalism. This was the year that the sports department of the New York Times pulled off the most digitally ambitious accomplishment in feature journalism, “Snow Fall,” a narrative of skiers buried in an avalanche that was told through the layering of words, video, and graphics. The story brought in countless readers and a Pulitzer Prize. (Actually, you can count the readers—the Times said “Snowfall” generated 3.5 million page views in one week alone.) This was also the year that digital upstarts like Buzzfeed and The Verge turned to “long-form” editors to create big features, and produced compelling work. Heralding “a coming renaissance of long-form journalism,” the twitchy news site Politico hired away the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine to commission writerly, deeply reported stories. “High-impact, magazine-style journalism is not a throwback to the past,” Politico’s editors declared in a memo that should chasten the hand-wringers. “It is a genre that is even more essential in today’s hyperkinetic news environment. It is a style of reporting and a mindset about illuminating what matters most that has a brilliant future.”
Is this just a fad, maybe even a fraud? Cynics would say that publishing a few big feature stories is a shortcut to respectability, and they’d be correct. But realists, I’m happy to say, would comment further that such features work: they draw in a lot of readers. As social networks of human beings displace search algorithms, digital editors are discovering that not just headlines but overall quality matters more and more, whether a story is short or long. If you hope to entice a real person to pass your story on to a friend, then reporting matters, writing matters, and design matters. As journalism and its distribution on the Web mature, the most meaningful distinction is turning out to be not short versus long but good versus bad.
All of which brings me, at last, to the journalistic triumph that is Brian Mockenhaupt’s feature “The Living and the Dead,” which appears in this volume. For a feature story, it is really, really long. But I defy you to find a wasted word among the 22,000 that Mockenhaupt assembled. Length here is not a virtue in itself; it is, like a notebook or a computer or curiosity, a writer’s tool, one that Mockenhaupt deploys, as he does the others, to maximum effect. As we follow a marine platoon on its rounds in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, details accrete, characters deepen, drama builds. We witness, over time, the shocking and more subtle consequences of abrupt twists in the action. (This is why length is so important in baseball, too, by the way). Few magazines these days could afford to devote the many pages that Mockenhaupt’s story would have required. I say “would have” because this story was published by Byliner, a digital platform for what its creators have the wit to call “quick reads.”
Among the paradoxes of this era, when commercial travails are menacing the most costly forms of reporting, is that we have coincidentally produced maybe the greatest generation of war correspondents in the country’s history. You will encounter the work of several of them in this volume. It is instructive to read Mockenhaupt’s piece against Dexter Filkins’s haunting memoir of war, “Atonement,” for the insights the comparison yields into storytelling technique and into the depth of experience these reporters have gained from so many years covering war. Mockenhaupt, an Iraq War veteran, vanishes into his story. His reporting is so precise, so knowing, that he never uses the first person to describe what he has witnessed. Filkins, by contrast, is central to his tale. Ten years ago he was there, in Baghdad, after Fox Company, Second Battalion, Twenty-Third Marine Regiment accidentally opened fire on a family fleeing a scene of fighting. Filkins chanced to meet the survivors, and he wrote about the family back then for the New York Times. So it was to Filkins, years later, that one of the guilt-wracked marines turned in hopes of finding the family, to explain himself and seek understanding, maybe forgiveness. Filkins ultimately helped arrange a meeting, and then, in The New Yorker, summed the costs of war by telling this story of one veteran’s, and one family’s, braided pain.
Here’s a taxonomic riddle for you: How is that Stephen King’s tale in this collection, though of comparable length to the “long-form” stories, is known as a “short story”? The King short story justifies its label’s emphasis on relative brevity—and further underscores the obtuseness of that other label—by delivering many of the satisfactions of a novel in a fraction of the length. It is a marvel of compression. In “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation,” we meet an ordinary, sad man on an ordinary, sad errand—taking his father out of his nursing home for lunch. With just a few brush strokes, King portrays a son feeling abandoned as his father slips away into dementia. And then this seemingly quiet tale takes a shocking turn that affirms the resilience of the father’s love for his child. Too many short stories these days, I think, read like writing exercises. You can admire the craftsmanship without feeling moved; you can respect the psychological insight while wondering why it is that nothing ever seems to happen. King’s story—comic, dramatic, poignant, revelatory—is a reminder of the potential power of this form to entertain and provoke.
Length is hardly the quality that most meaningfully classifies these stories. Yet there is a legitimate conundrum here: If long-form doesn’t fit, what term is elastic enough to encompass the varied journalism in this anthology, from the war stories to Mimi Swartz’s lacerating examination of the assault on family planning in Texas, for Texas Monthly, to Charles Graeber’s rollicking profile, for Wired, of the digital pioneer and accused criminal Kim Dotcom? How do you link a cinematic narrative, like Chris Heath’s account for GQ of what happened when dozens of animals escaped a private zoo in Ohio, to a crystalline marvel of thinking and writing like Charles C. Mann’s essay, for Orion, on the nature and fate of our own species?
And how do you account for the blurring of boundaries also evident here, as work from the digital realm energizes and reshapes traditional forms of journalism? For the first time, a purely digital magazine, Slate, won a National Magazine Award in head-to-head competition with print magazines, for the crisp authority of Dahlia Lithwick’s commentary on the Supreme Court. Consider, also, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who won the award for one of the oldest forms of magazine writing, the essay. That may have looked like a straightforward old-school triumph, but it wasn’t. The morning after he won, Coates wrote a blog post thanking his commenters for their help over the years as, on our website, he worked through the ideas that ultimately cohered to form the essay. Noting that The Atlantic had also won the National Magazine Award for best website, Coates wrote, “In my mind, these awards are linked. Writing for the Web site has fundamentally changed how I write in print.”
The magazine industry is moving past lazy dichotomies of print versus digital to a fusion of old values, ambitions, and techniques with new ways and means of reporting and storytelling. This is a hard transition, obviously, but, equally obviously, there’s no going back. As journalists—people whose job it has always been to go out and learn something new every day—we should be on the attack, not in a defensive crouch. We should be talking about what we do in terms that help us look forward as well as back. So what can we call this emerging fusion? It seems to me that one might quite reasonably take a page from the last period of great creative ferment in our business and call it, simply, new journalism. What journalism could be newer? But there’s another perfectly good, honorable name for this kind of work—the one on the cover of this anthology. You might just call it all magazine writing. And get on with it.