Ryan Chittum has taken a look at the length of the stories on the front page of the WSJ.
Here’s what’s happened to the number of stories under 1,500 words:
Here’s the stories over 1,500 words:
And here’s the stories over 2,500 words:
Ryan is dismayed at these trends. “Without going long,” he writes, “it’s hard to achieve greatness”:
Certainly, the Journal still does lots of top-flight work, and most stories don’t need 2,500 words. But many do, and how does going short as a policy help readers understand the really important stuff like systemic problems, corporate misbehavior, business innovation, or sweeping economic change?
I, on the other hand, am much more sympathetic to what Murdoch is doing here. WSJ readers are busy: they don’t have time to wade through lots of overstuffed stories in the morning. They want to know what’s going on, and why, and they want their news-delivery mechanism to be as efficient as possible.
If you look at the chart of stories over 1,500 words, it peaked at 800 per year in 2006. That’s more than 2.5 such stories per day, every day including Saturdays. And that’s just on the front page! If you look at the paper as a whole, the 1,500-word stories were appearing at a pace of six per day before Murdoch came along and brought some sense to proceedings.
I read long business and finance stories for a living—that’s my job—and I don’t read six per day, let alone six per day from a single publication. The job of the WSJ is not to overload its readers with many hours’ worth of reading every day. And the current pace, of roughly one long-form front-page story per day, seems much more reasonable to me. (Most readers, of course, won’t even read that—but at least they won’t be completely overwhelmed.)
At the same time, it’s great that the WSJ is putting lots of important information on its front page in sub-1,500-word form—on top of the “What’s News” briefs. As a news consumer, I don’t even want anything nearly that long—I’m looking to get what I need within a few hundred words at most. US newspaper stories have a lot of water weight, and nearly all of them could stand to lose a few pounds.
And what of the dramatic fall-off in the really long-form stuff, over 2,500 words? Up until 2007, those managed to make the front page roughly every other day. Then they all but disappeared, and you’ll find maybe one a month at this point.
I can easily see why that should be the case. Very long stories are often highly self-indulgent, and they take a huge amount of time, effort, and money to put together. Sometimes, they’re incredibly important, and well worth both writing and reading. Often, however, they seem to be aimed at other journalists more than at the WSJ’s core business audience—most of which simply doesn’t have the time to read such things. In a good news organization, I think, the bar should be high before any such story is inflicted on millions of blameless readers. And keeping the output of long-form stories low is one great way of doing that.
The Columbia Journalism Review is naturally going to want to encourage “greatness” in American newspapers, and for decades now “greatness” in journalism has been synonymous with Very Long Stories. But I don’t think, frankly, that the WSJ’s readers have any particular interest in getting a serving of greatness alongside their breakfast cereal in the morning. They’re much more interested in news. And that, to its credit, is what the WSJ is giving them.
Good points all, Mr. Fish. And amen to all that.
Consider for a minute, though, that subset of WSJ readers who are not all about day trading or whatever. You did a pretty funny take-down the other day on the stock market "reporting" that lards up every day's newspapers with nonsense about what "caused" that day's Dow Jones Industrial Average to shift 26 or 81 or 422 points. Those stories are always under 1,000 words. They are always aimed at the readership you claim to speak for here.
What about the readers who want to get a deep sense of something that's going on in the financial world? And not necessarily just on Wednesday at breakfast. Or consider the regulators and prosecutors who have (in the past, mostly) responded to long form stories in the WSJ and elsewhere by investigating and then collaring the mountebanks. Not to offend our hard-working AUSAs, Treasury Agents and FBI Special Agents, but every little bit of investigative vigor probably helps some, no?
Then too: Once it's in the Journal, it's there, and I might find it useful a month or even five years later. A historian or economist might find it useful two decades later. Will they find your blog posts as much so?
Just as there is a time value of money, I submit that there is a time value of long form journalism, and it stretches a bit beyond 10 a.m. on the given trading day.
#1 Posted by edward ericson jr., CJR on Tue 11 Oct 2011 at 07:30 PM
@Edward -- I didn't know how to respond to this post at first. Disagreed with much of its thrust, but couldn't put it into writing. You've said it perfectly.
I read a classic, old-style WSJ feature the other day. Written before 1990. Moving piece. Spoke to something deeper. Not sure what of the current iteration of the Journal -- though it is still is a good paper -- will have any value 20 years on.
#2 Posted by business journalist, CJR on Tue 11 Oct 2011 at 09:01 PM
I don't know about story length, but I thought the WSJ's reporting on the gulf oil spill was the best of any news source. It covered the engineering, financial arrangements, political angles, and the environmental fallout.
The stories weren't huge, but they were readable and not of the length that make me put them in my Saturday, if I have the time, pile of papers.
Some people just want to complain.
#3 Posted by JIm, CJR on Wed 12 Oct 2011 at 10:14 AM
Felix, I think you are missing some of Ryan's original point. Nobody is claiming (or expecting) that readers of the old Journal read ALL of those big stories every day. I can't imagine anyone did, or would want to. But the depth of the reporting and the quality of the writing were an important part of the paper's -- and journalism's -- fourth estate responsibilities in this country. Those stories got subjects on the agenda for other publications, companies, elected officials and investigators. They also served as examples and inspiration for other papers.
There are many important subjects that any good newspaperman will admit won't bring in a ton of readers, but which still need to be reported. You can't tell every story about economic restructuring or governmental intransigence through the Kardashians. Yes, "nobody" reads those stories, except for the 100 or so people at the state capitol who can hold hearings, launch an investigation and write new laws, or the handful of investigators at the inspector general's office or the county prosecutor's office who can sanction the bad guys or even put them in jail.
Who would have read a big, three-part series analyzing the evidence against "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq before the war? Very few readers. But the entire country would have been served much better if many stories like that had been written and read by enough people to prompt some real debate. Instead, the news media looked like a bunch of dopes who got played (which they did) and we have thousands of American soldiers dead and 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed for a war based on lies.
But, hey, at least we didn't inconvenience readers with some long stories.
#4 Posted by Brian O'Connor, CJR on Wed 12 Oct 2011 at 10:56 AM