Apparently Salon's loss of ad revenue and subsequent layoffs has the Internet pioneer rethinking its long-form journalism model in favor of, well, looking like all the other crap on the Web.
What this article doesn't say is that they already shortened their articles; back in 2003, they were still publishing New Yorker-length pieces that were so in-depth and well-written, I used them in my college classes. Take a gander at this article on a long argument between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis that had a profound effect on the two authors' classic works. Since then, the stories have gotten leaner, and in my opinion, the quality has gone down as well. I shudder to think what the new Salon will look like, and it seems I'm not the only one:
But Bob Sacks, president of marketing and media planner Precision Media Group, says that running away from the print-style magazine format will ultimately be self-defeating for Salon. He tells NewsPay: “If we go to aggregation as our formula, as our business model, we won’t be publishers as we were. ... We’ll lose our revenue stream. We’ll be another funnel to Google.”
via paidcontent.org
I'm not saying, by the way, that short pieces are always crap and long is always better. Blaise Pascal once apologized for the length of one of his letters, saying he did not have "the leisure to make it shorter." It sometimes takes time to edit down a mess; just ask any poet. However, long-form journalism is what I depend upon in order to really understand an issue. Most news stories leave me with more questions than answers. But I read an article in Harper's on the Mexican drug cartel and come to know the complexity and nuance of the problem. Sure, I read Harper's on paper, but if I find a really good long piece online, I'll invest the time to read it, even on my little laptop screen. The best thing I've ever read about the Craigslist phenomenon is this piece in Wired, which took time and editing to produce. Note the length, and the lack of annoying page jumps.
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