Long form journalism going down the tube

Whatever happened to the Sunday story? It took up two pages of text, ran with tons of art and evoked emotion in its readers. Readers could get up with a lazy cup of coffee and have something to talk and think about for the rest of the day.

This article online at American Journalism Review laments the end of long-form stories in an eloquent, if not elongated way. Of course, what would you expect from a story of the demise of magazine journalism printed in the newspaper?

One thing I have had to get used to working at the H&N is this idea of multiple entry points. It's not a new concept to me, but I always considered subheads, breakout boxes and compelling cutlines to be entry points. I also thought of it in a digital sense, where links within the story can lead readers to more information. It has been hard adjusting to writing the same story in four pieces. And with a small news hole day after day, it seems like its wasting space to put in so many different headlines.

But that's the way it's done here. It almost seems to me that online might be the new place for long-form journalism. I am tempted to write two stories, one that is cohesive that could appear online, the other that is pieced out for the print edition. I'm not trying to create more work for myself, but when stories appear online, sometimes they don't all get there. Then our online readers are less informed, ask questions that the stories answered, and think the newspaper has failed in some way.

I plan to mull it over some more before attempting to submit two versions of my stories. I think online stories that jump give readers a break, give sales reps a space to put ads and give editors a gauge of how much of longer stories are being consumed. Do people ever get to the last page? I know when a story is written well enough, I sure do.