What’s so wrong with writing long?

By Roy Peter Clark

In an article in The American Editor, Knight Ridder executive Clark Hoyt makes the strange claim that “Long, windy stories threaten to be the death of newspapers.”

Not sensationalism, irrelevance, arrogance, or bad ethics. Not staff cutbacks, shrinking newsholes, ink rub-off, or the paperboy tossing the fishwrap into the rose bushes. Not inaccuracy, anonymous sources, dogged negativity, insensitivity, or bias. Nosiree. The problem, oh editors of America, is long stories. Look out your windows, editors, and see the cavalcade of protestors. Read their signs: “Long Stories – Stop the Horror” and “Don’t Jump – Or We Will.”

Hoyt declares, “We must do something to encourage what newspaper readers want – sharply focused, tightly written pieces that get on, and off, the stage quickly.”

Who could disagree with that? Raise your hand if you want to waste readers’ time. I have argued, in fact, that all stories should be measured not by words or inches, but by ART, Approximate Reading Time. Before we ask readers to spend one, three, five, ten or forty minutes on a feature or series, we must make sure that each story justifies its length.

Let’s stipulate that the secret garden of many stories could use some pruning. Does that portend the “death of newspapers”? I can recognize the dangers posed by new media, by lost revenue, by a sagging economy, by exploitative hype. But long stories?

My puzzlement at Hoyt’s doomsday scenario for newspapers turned to sympathy when the real cause of his agony was revealed: He had spent the season judging journalism contests. Hoyt is not a sore ass, he has a sore ass. Pity him for those long days of sitting and reading. Story after story. Series after series. Caravans of them.

It’s only fair to let Hoyt exemplify his plight: “Let me tell you about one story entered in a breaking news category. This story is from an excellent newspaper for which I have great respect. It reported the verdict in the murder trial of a teenager accused of killing her mother. The story was more than 2,000 words long, and the writers didn’t get around to telling you guilty or not guilty under the 112th paragraph. The first six paragraphs recounted a shopping trip by the girl’s lawyers the evening before the verdict. They bought her a baby pink sweater set.”

Hoyt complains: “Reading this story, I felt like a rush-hour motorist trapped in a line of traffic at a rail crossing, waiting for a 200-car freight train to creep past.” That’s a clever slam, and all readers will like what they like, and hate what they hate. There can be no disputing matters of taste.

There is, however, in Hoyt’s sharp indictment the rhetorical flavor of an expose, that an unnamed newspaper he respects wrote an endless story, filled with self-indulgent details, hiding the “news” until the end. Missing from Hoyt’s argument is news context and a countervailing array of facts.

First the lead-buriers must be revealed for the heretics they are: Tom French, Anne Hull and Sue Carlton of The St. Petersburg Times (Anne recently joined the Washington Post.) Under the direction of their editors, they undertook one of the most ambitious news telling projects in recent memory: to write daily deadline narrative accounts of one of West Florida’s most interesting and controversial criminal trials.

The stories they produced are still available on the St. Petersburg Times website. Some readers, like Hoyt, may find them too long and indirect. But the consensus in the community, according to available measurements, indicates readers found them riveting, relevant to their real interests, and worth the extra work required to keep up with them. The first reader I asked about the series, a secretary-receptionist, told me she “read every word” and was eager to talk about the stories in detail – more than a year after they have been published.

Hoyt’s critique is simply uninformed. It leaves out the news environment that created a hunger for information and argument, the broad and deep conversation within the community about the issues in the trial.

Here are some facts: In 1998 a 15-year-old Tampa girl named Valessa Robinson may have helped her 19-year-old boyfriend (nicknamed “Rattlesnake”) kill her mom. The mother was injected with bleach and stabbed, her body stuffed in a garbage can and left in the woods, her van stolen and driven from Florida to Texas.

Rattlesnake sits on death row. In a compromise verdict, Valessa was found guilty of murder in the third degree. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Throughout the trial, which was televised, citizens of West Florida were confronted with a set of urgent questions: How do you tell the difference between a confused teen and a potential murderer? What degree of responsibility should a 15-year-old bear? Do we treat violent girls different than we treat boys? Are men exploiting young teenage girls? What resources are available for a single mom struggling with a dangerously rebellious teen? Where was the father?

All evidence suggests the stories were read thoroughly. Editor Neville Green reports that only two letters to the editor criticized the length and shape of coverage. Messages to the website, letters, phone calls and private conversations in the hundreds indicated reader approval and enthusiasm. Rack sales in Tampa increased 15 per cent. Most important, citizens were talking about the stories, arguing whether Valessa was a responsible killer or a vulnerable child, corrupted by a sadistic boyfriend.

Which brings us to the “baby pink sweater set” that Hoyt reviles. Although Valessa was a highly sexualized, drug-using punk, her defense attorneys worked hard to change her image for the jury, a common defense tactic. But in this case the makeover– complete with girlish jumpers and mary jane shoes – made Valessa look like a kid preparing for confirmation, a strategy that enraged parts of the community. Where was the real Valessa? The detail about the pink sweater was not a frill, but at the heart of what folks were talking about.

Now for that buried lead. Funny how narrative works, how we keep reading or keep watching till the end, how we stick with a story to find out what will happen next. A trial presents reporters and their readers with an almost perfect narrative arc. Will she be convicted? And what will happen to her?

And consider this: the verdict was announced almost 18 hours before a typical St. Pete Times reader picked the paper off of the driveway. During those 18 hours, the verdict was shown on television, again and again, published on websites, discussed on talk radio, and spread by word of mouth. If ever there was a strategic moment to avoid restating what folks already knew, this was it. As a result, the Times constantly appeared ahead of the story, rather than behind it. It became the place to go if you wanted the real deal, the inside scoop.

And it worked. Readers embraced the form as a natural way to tell a story. The journalists inside the Times were proud of their newspaper for trying to tell such textured stories on deadline. The ASNE judges honored the work by selecting the writers as finalists.

Hoyt’s complaint says less about the quality of news stories than it does about the liturgies of prize juries. I’ve been there. We are required to read too much in too short a period of time.

Our experience is so far removed from that of the daily reader, we are so pressured to press forward, that a bias develops against the longest work. There are two easy solutions to this dilemma: Develop prize categories that encourage short writing (Best Story Under 800 Words); and send the long stories and series to jurors ahead of time, the way the Pulitzer jurors judge books.

Stories should be written for readers and not for prize jurors. All stories should justify their length. But I see no evidence that the death virus for newspapers is hidden in long stories. I suspect that the real culprits are superficiality, irrelevance, and boredom. The greatest of these is boredom.

Clark is senior scholar and reporting, writing and editing faculty at the Poynter Institute.