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Writing - Journalists got into the business because they love to tell stories, but do readers have the time to read them?

Author: Clark Hoyt
Published: May 01, 2001
Last Updated: October 08, 2001
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Writing

Journalists got into the business because they love to tell stories, but do readers have the time to read them?

By Clark Hoyt

I never said that long, windy stories are the only threats to newspapers. Sure, sensationalism, irrelevance, arrogance and bad ethics are threats. So, as Roy Peter Clark, a distinguished academic, says, are superficiality and boredom. Staff cutbacks? Shrinking newsholes? They may be more symptoms of newspapers’ ills, not the root causes of them.

Other threats are increased competition from other media, a declining sense of community and changing lifestyles, including an ever faster pace that leaves people feeling they have less time to spend with a newspaper.

And that brings us right back to long stories.

Clark says nobody can disagree with the premise that readers want sharply focused, tightly written pieces that get on and off the stage quickly. But then he argues against it.

Faced with the inconvenient fact that readers spend an average of no more than 15 minutes a day reading the newspaper, Clark introduces a clever replacement for the clock. Instead of real time, we now have something called ART, Approximate Reading Time. Unfortunately, the reader with only 10 minutes to spend on the morning paper probably doesn’t care whether that monster narrative takes 30 real minutes to read or 30 approximate minutes. He doesn’t have either one.

In the end, Approximate Reading Time is just the latest way to rationalize our stubborn refusal to listen to readers, to respect what they are telling us and to act on it. Sure, there are long stories that are of such transcendent interest and written with such powerful skill that they justify their length. There are just far fewer of them than the number of long stories published every day in America’s newspapers.

Let’s face it, most of us got into this business because we love to tell stories. At 300 words, we’re just clearing our throats. Cut off a story at 500 words? That’s an insult to all the effort I’ve put into the reporting. 1,000 words? Well, that’s a start. I submit that this process is driven by internal journalistic needs, not by a concern for readers and what they want from us.

For readers’ sakes, we need to learn the fine art of telling stories quickly, with rapid-fire impact. The long, leisurely, slowly unfolding narrative is great for books and may work in some magazines. It’s usually deadly for daily newspapers.

As for that St. Petersburg Times story, clearly Clark and I don’t agree. I understood the context; it was made clear in the letter nominating the piece for an ASNE Writing Award. The defendant’s makeover should have been old news by the end of a 10-day trial. What readers needed on the morning after the verdict was a story explaining why and how the jurors decided on their compromise verdict. This story never even addressed those questions.

Clark mocks criticism of long stories by asking where are the protesters marching in the streets. The protesters are the tens of thousands of former newspaper readers who have dropped their subscriptions and the countless others, many of them young and affluent, who haven’t started subscribing. Why? “No time to read,” they tell us. The circulation slide is now most pronounced on Sunday, the day we reserve for the very longest of our long stories.

Instead of arguing for stories with long narrative arcs, we need to be celebrating more excellent stories that pack in information with great economy, stories that are (dare I say it?) short.

Hoyt is Washington Editor of Knight Ridder.


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