Searching for the Magic Key

It comes as a surprise to no one that newspapers have long been in trouble. Some would say the format of printing yesterday's news on low quality paper as cheaply as possible began to fade with the advent of radio.  Newspapers began countering the immediacy of radio (how could they compete with Edward R. Murrow announcing "This is London..." as blitzkrieg bombs rained down?) with long, in-depth pieces and a claim to being a daily offering to the nation's historical record.

However, as a report in the Columbia Journalism Review points out, newspapers are having a hard time finding the magic key to the financial maze in which they find themselves.  It seems our Internet generation is disinterested in long-form journalism, and, other than a sprinkling of librarians and historians, not very interested in the historical record.  As the article states:

And it’s pretty to shocking to see what’s become of the time-honored form since the newspaper industry’s great unraveling started a decade ago. 

The Los Angeles Times, for instance, published 256 stories longer than 2,000 words last year, compared to 1,776 in 2003—a drop of 86 percent, according to searches of the Factiva database. The Washington Post published 1,378 stories over 2,000 words last year, about half as many as 2003 when it published 2,755. The Wall Street Journal, which pioneered the longform narrative in American newspapers, published 35 percent fewer stories over 2,000 words last year from a decade ago, 468 from 721.

Click here for the rest of the (relatively brief) article from CJR