The New, New, New Journalism

 Keynote Address

The New, New, New Journalism?

Gerry Marzorati, editor-in-chief, New York Times Magazine

Wednesday, March 25, 4-5:15 p.m.

Standing in line to order lunch one afternoon last September, Gerry Marzorati watched a man in his early 20s straining to read his Blackberry. When Marzorati managed to get a glimpse of the screen, he realized the man was reading a cover story from The New York Times Magazine—a 10,000-word nonfiction narrative about the tribal areas of Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan.

“My first question was ‘Why would anyone want to read 10,000 words of anything that way?’” Marzorati told the CASE conference attendees Wednesday afternoon. Delving into a world where communication has been reduced to text messages and twitter tweets, Marzorati explored the relevance of long-form magazine journalism. “I am worried that I—and others who do what I do—will be turning out the lights on what I do after not too long.”

With “Blackberry dude” serving as a cornerstone for his keynote address, Marzorati discussed the differences in how people are reading. On one hand, the Blackberry carrier was reading; on another, he wasn’t paying to read it.

Defining long-form journalism as pieces of 8,000 to 15,000 or more words, Marzorati described the art in the presentation of these well-researched stories, offering examples from The New York Times Magazine. Often built around scenes or journeys, each piece can take as long as an hour to read.

“The bet is that the narrative will be so carefully constructed to drag you in,” he said. But his concern for the genre’s fate was evident. The cost of a typical cover story in The New York Times Magazine—photography excluded—can cost more than $40,000. “Often if a war zone is involved, considerably more,” he said. “And if a reader is an online reader, paying nothing, who’s going to foot the bill?”

Marzorati treated his listeners to a historic look at the history of long-form magazine journalism, placing its start at August 31, 1946, when The New Yorker published a piece telling the story of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and highlighting the genre’s explosion in the 1960s. He defined long-form journalism as a distinctly American form in which information is transformed into experience. “We crave stories, all cultures do, but we also crave facts, lots of facts, and facts are more compelling and easier to digest, when arranged narratively.”

Despite issues of access today as writers try to uncover this type of in-depth story, Marzorati noted that long-form journalism is still possible in health and science, sports writing, stories about the poor, and war reporting.

Looking at people like “Blackberry dude” who read the Times Magazine’s cover story online each week—as many as hundreds of thousands of people—Marzorati considered that some of those readers live in places where the print version is not available. “But I imagine that most of them are like my teenage son and are undaunted by clicking 25 times to get through a piece. This is good news,” he said. “Our most popular pieces are the longest.”

In the online version of stories, The New York Times Magazine sprinkles links, embeds video, provides space for comments, and often has the author of the piece online to take questions. Particularly topical pieces are placed online early, intending to drive people to buy the print publication. “And I’m OK with that. The work that my staff and I work hard to create gets before more eyeballs as a result. But…what are those eyeballs actually experiencing?”

For example, how can a reader understand the research behind the piece—and, without the weight of the magazine in his hands, how can a reader comprehend the authority of the words, Marzorati asked. “And without buying that object, how is the reader to understand that this piece is not just a lengthy rift written by someone in his pajamas, but an expensively produced report?”

 Those questions, Marzorati estimates, will be answered in the next four or five years.

In response to one question about the fact that two of the past six covers have been basketball related, Marzorati said, “People really think that there’s an enormous engine of contemplative decision making that goes on, not like ‘Oh s---, we don’t have anything to run this week.’ And it’s much more the latter than you would think.”

Discussing the stories and online features that attract the most interest, Marzorati said the magazine editors are careful not to let popularity dictate all of the story choices. “We know very clearly what stories get the most traffic and make it onto the most e-mail lists. It’s a temptation that you have to be careful about. Stories about health, stories about sex, stories about religion, that’s your top tier, then you go down to education and then foreign (is) nowhere.”

Asked how to write fresh, timely stories for a less-often-published higher ed magazine when news changes constantly, Marzorati said, “Those big stories keep coming back, so your story runs into the news anyway. If you have something fresh to say about any of those topics, that will be fine. Leverage to the people you are actually near. People are interested in people who think. They’re getting their actual raw information somewhere else. But if you have some really smart, interesting professor on your campus who’s thinking about these things in a new way, leverage that. There’s a reason why the Times op/ed page gets a lot more traffic than our news stories. People get a sense that they know what the news is. What they want is someone who can give you a quick take on it.”

The magazine has spent a fair amount of money on video without seeing much traffic to those features, Marzorati said. Slideshows, however, have been inexpensive and popular. The magazine’s parenting blog has been successful as has a weekly food recipe show called “Tiny Kitchen.”

“The key is that you don’t have to be the programmer. You don’t have to know the technology any more than you have to know how the printing press worked,” he said. “It’s changing so, so rapidly that it’s not your job to actually know how it all works. But it is your job to try to figure out what it is works for your publication in the experience of this new medium or media.”

Though one questioner asked how to write for a generation without an attention span, Marzorati said he is not convinced that is true. “This form of journalism I’m talking about has never been a mass form anyway,” he said. “What I see is a difference in what people will read about.” His magazine sees an increase in interest in what the editors there call “the way we live now” or lifestyle stories and stories with an emotional content, inside a family or a relationship.

“People will sit and listen to ‘This American Life,’ which is really an oral form of long-form journalism in a way,” he said. “There’s also an appetite in this country for documentary filmmaking that never existed before, which again is a form of long-form journalism.” 

Addressing whether journalism should be funded through foundations and educational institutions, Marzorati said the problem goes beyond long-form journalism. “The truth is that there’s no reporting that’s going on in this country today that’s profitable. Reporting is just not profitable, whether you look at newspaper reporting, whether you look at television news. All that reporting is one way or another being subsidized.”

Instead, while upper-class Americans have never been better informed, the country has seen an increase in supermarket tabloid journalism, “digested by the have-nots,” and leading to a “coarsening” of American culture, Marzorati said. “We don’t really feel it because we’re reading the Economist and we’re reading newspapers. To be educated and sophisticated in this culture is to have access to high-quality information. But that information is not getting to a vast majority of Americans.”

—Rita Buettner

Editors' Note: We will be posting Marzorati's entire remarks in the next couple of days.