Last year, I was often met with enthusiastic inquiries of "Have you listened to all of Serial yet?! It's so good." This week, while waiting for our conference room to free up, I was asked (for the third time this week, geeze people) "Have you watched Making a Murderer?! It's so good!" Seemingly everywhere I turn, people are plunking down and watching, listening (and maybe even reading? People still do that, right?) hours of material on a single story, binging episodes for answers like Sherlock Holmes on the chase. After, they emerge to share this experience with a knowing and resolute air, like they just attended a murder-mystery dinner theatre and they're 93% sure they know who killed the philandering duke during the power outage (never mind the story was fed to them, theatrically, from one vantage point).
The question that came to my mind is one that is being raised elsewhere, too; how is long-form making a mass play today in our shrinking content world? What's driving our pop cultural need for in-depth journalism, when we could read about it in 100 words or less? I say pop-cultural because long-form has always been around, but the world it exists in now and way it's being consumed, and en mass en vogue, is so uniquely different. The fascination with the long-form journalism, while traditional newspaper and broadcast outlets continue to condense to short-form soundbites, is one of marvel, something industry professionals have been quick to point out. As Twitter is about to expand its 140 characters to 10,000, and shows about a single case like The Jinx expand into hours of coverage we have to ask ourselves; why the change? Are we finally regaining control of our fabled tiny attention spans, or is there something larger happening in culture that is moving us back towards time-consuming, patience required storytelling of yonder years? Enter my own long form investigation. Actually, neither of us have time for that, let's make that medium form. Medium rare.
This may be a perfectly short 20 word newsflash, but this isn't that first time there's been public interest--widespread public interest--in long-form journalism (damn, that was 26). My mind instantly went back to the master of long-form investigative journalism, Edward R. Murrow. In the fledgling era of television and journalistic broadcast, Murrow didn't just report the news, he created it. Through a series of docu-reports, he informed the public of injustices or abuse worthy of extensive coverage and national attention when there otherwise wouldn't be awareness. His work contributed to putting a stop to Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare, and his piece Harvest of Shame, on the impoverished lives of migrant workers, which was intended to "shock the consciousness of the nation," did exactly that; it prompted national discussion, and helped push through legislation for health services and education for children of migrants.
Murrow was fulfilling a need with his long form journalism; at the dawn of the 1950s, Edward R. Murrow was covering special events for CBS evening news, and was dismayed that the new medium of television was emphasizing the novel idea of showing a variety of nifty moving pictures, rather than the content--the actual news and ideas that could be told in the burgeoning medium. He dug deep to make the medium live up to its potential, and to challenge viewers to look at controversial, complicated, and important issues that could otherwise be avoided if not presented in an interesting format for mass consumption. But that was in days before RSS feeds, the 5 Minute News updates, and soundbite news from Skimm and Summly (which Yahoo! paid $30 million for, btw). In the years after Murrow, news got shorter, our attention spans slimmer, and long-form existed only for those dedicated-cerebral-speed-reading go-getters with the time to indulge in it.
Today, long form seems to be evolving to fulfill a modern need, very similar to that of Murrow's day. Nightly news and broadcast gives you the world in 30 minutes; that's not a lot of time for a lot of world. Like Murrow's day, a smattering of feel-good stories, celebrity, and local news, eclipse any depth of coverage on real issues. Or arguably, these sultry topics simply reflect our thin interest in depth and "real" news. Our popular news networks are held as wildly biased or simply, inaccurate. A whopping 42% of Americans don't think their news networks are trustworthy. Reminiscent of Murrow's television-era, the news-broadcast medium is perceived as simply not living up to its potential. Now enter the internets, podcasts and streaming services--which invest in whatever content they choose, often without hefty mega-corporate funding and interests. How do you explain the complicated failing of the justice system for Steven Avery and get millions of people to care? You tell the story on a place where people, lots of people, tend to spend 9 hours in their sweatpants in-front of the TV, chain-watching content while eating Taco Bell. And you serve it up in a decidedly non-news way. The way you hear people describe the case, you'd think it was an episode of Orange is the New Black. It's new entertainment. It's new-news. The Atlantic's James Bennet perhaps said it best: “New Journalism” is a stirring promise to the wider world; “long-form” is the mumbled incantation of a decaying priesthood." When segments from John Oliver and Colbert are our most trusted new sources, and 63% of us get our news from social media, it's clear that this isn't Murrow's world anymore, and perhaps it isn't the long-form of yesteryears, either. Our expectations of journalism is changing alongside our expectations of channel roles and content consumption at large. It appears we are here to be entertained, and we'll take our news that way, too, regardless of the length.
As to making any further predictions on what we can expect for the future from this brave, new journalistic world, to that I can only say:
Good night, and good luck.
