“The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is ‘What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there is nothing unique about publishing anymore because users can do it for themselves?’ We are now starting to see that question being answered.”—Clay Shirky

“The whole notion of ‘long-form journalism’ is writer-centered, not public-centered.”—Jeff Jarvis

“As a journalist, I’ve long taken it for granted that, for example, my readers know more than I do—and it’s liberating.”—Dan Gillmor

“As career journalists and managers we have entered a new era where what we know and what we traditionally do has finally found its value in the marketplace, and that value is about zero.”—John Paton

“The story is the thing.”—S. S. McClure

One

Ida M. Tarbell, a writer for McClure’s Magazine, a general-interest monthly, was chatting with her good friend and editor, John S. Phillips, in the magazine’s offices near New York’s Madison Square Park, trying to decide what she should take on next.

Tarbell, then forty-three years old, was already one of the most prominent journalists in America, having written popular multipart historical sketches of Napoleon, Lincoln, and a French revolutionary figure known as Madame Roland, a moderate republican guillotined during the Terror. Thanks in part to her work, McClure’s circulation had jumped to about 400,000, making it one of the most popular, and profitable, publications in the country.

Phillips, a founder of the magazine, was its backbone. Presiding over an office of bohemians and intellectuals, this father of five was as calm and deliberative as the magazine’s namesake, S. S. McClure, was manic and extravagant. Considered by many to be a genius, McClure was also just an impossible boss—forever steaming in from Europe, throwing the office into turmoil with new schemes, ideas, and editorial changes. “I can’t sit still,” he once told Lincoln Steffens. “That’s your job and I don’t see how you can do it!”

At McClure’s, there was always, as Tarbell would later put it, much “fingering” of a subject before the magazine decided to launch on a story, and in this case there was more than usual. The subject being kicked around was nothing less than the great industrial monopolies, known as “trusts,” that had come to dominate the American economy and political life. It was the summer of 1901.

The natural choice, in the end, was oil. Tarbell had grown up in Pennsylvania’s oil country; her father had run a business making oil barrels and a small refinery; her brother worked for one of the few remaining competitors in an industry 90 percent dominated by the greatest of all monopolies, the “mother of trusts,” John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. She drew up an outline, and Phillips approved. But McClure, recovering from exhaustion, was on a doctor-ordered yearlong rest in Switzerland. “Go over,” Phillips said, “and show the outline to Sam.”

“I want to think it over,” McClure said after Tarbell pitched the idea in a Lausanne hospital. He then announced that they would mull over the story while traveling to Greece, where McClure’s family would spend the winter. “We can discuss Standard Oil in Greece as well as here,” he said. So they headed south, stopping along the way for tours of Italy’s Lake District and Milan—then to rest at the famous Salsomaggiore spa, where they took lengthy mud baths and “steam soaks” and contemplated just who and what they were about to take on.

Finally, eager to get started, Tarbell cut the trip short. Approval in hand, she returned to New York to begin reporting on what stands, to this day, as the greatest business story ever written.