Josh Gordon: Reviving journalism's old standard

I spent over half an hour reading one article in this Sunday's edition of The New York Times. The reason for my lengthy struggle with a single report is not that I'm a slow reader, but rather that this article took up three full pages of the newspaper, in addition to a few column inches on the front page.

The article, "How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms

Intelligence," takes an incredibly in-depth look at intelligence gathering and the administration's use of that intelligence, in asserting that Saddam Hussein was attempting to rebuild his nuclear weapons program. I say incredibly in-depth, because the article is 10,194 words long. To give you some context for that figure, this column is about 850 words long. Most newspaper articles, including the ones in The Daily Pennsylvanian yesterday, range from 500 to 600 words. A 10,000-word article is the journalistic version of a dissertation.

This is not an everyday occurrence. It is, quite possibly, the longest article the Times has ever published. It is certainly in the top 10. The next longest Times article I could find, the explanation of the Jayson Blair reporting scandal, was only two-thirds of that length.

Putting aside the actual content of the piece (which is so important that all Americans should be required to read it before they vote), the sheer structural abnormality of the article makes it worth discussing. The news media have, over the past decade or so, embarked on a steady trend to present stories in a shorter, more concise and supposedly more palatable way. Newspaper articles have grown shorter, due in part to the conventional wisdom that says 50 percent of readers will give up on an article if it jumps to another page.

On TV, an individual story is rarely given more than two minutes. To make matters worse, most cable news stations -- where a majority of Americans get their news -- now condense a significant portion of their hard news coverage to a single sentence, that horrible ticker on the bottom of the screen.

In short (pun intended), what we have is sound-bite journalism, where nuance, detail and intricacy are dumped in favor of flashy images and quick segments. And this trend is getting worse.

More and more, journalists can't cover the whole issue simply because they are not given the time.

While Americans might embrace this style because it makes hard issues seem simple, sound-bite journalism is not in the public's best interest. No matter what Bush says, there is something complicated about supporting our troops. In fact, there is something complicated about nearly every major news story of the day, and people deserve to be presented with these complexities. When journalists leave out details because of structural conventions, they are doing a disservice to their audience and, by extension, their entire country.

So, great, one Times article is bucking the trend, but what good can this verbose island of detail do to change such a pervasive pattern? Well, contrary to popular opinion, this article is not alone. Web logs, commonly known as "blogs," are taking a similar stand against sound-bite journalism.

Blogging is a fairly new phenomenon, and in its most influential form, it is a platform from which a political ideologue or commentator discusses the issues of the day. Bloggers can post as often or infrequently as they want, and take as many words as they deem necessary to finish their thought. In "Talking Points Memo," a liberal blog run by Joshua Micah Marshall that I read semi-regularly, I have seen posts that range from one sentence to many pages. On a blog, the length of a discussion is based on how much information and analysis is needed to fully present the issue, not how many minutes are allotted for national news, or how many inches are left on the front page.

Now, it seems to me that a media structure that allows for varying length of discussion based on the importance and complexity of an issue is far superior to a rigid system where details get left out, questions don't get answered and staying within the word count is more important than getting the whole story.

In fact, the Web blog system is so obviously superior that I can't think of a single reason why other news outlets should continue to use their current system.

And in that light, this Times article of precedent-setting length, is a step in the right direction. It shows that the standard of full reporting isn't quite dead. It is, however, in need of immediate CPR. This Times article, along with the absurdly long Jayson Blair explanation, are in essence apology articles. The subtext in each is, "Oops, sorry, American public. We fucked up and didn't get the whole story until just now, when it's too late. But that's OK, because here is the entire story, the way we should have presented it in the first place."

Hopefully, bloggers' influence will help the mainstream media realize that they should report the whole story as it happens, instead of having to cover their asses when it's too late.

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