Going Long in a No-Jump World   

Papers are more selective about lengthy projects, and good writing is often the key to getting them in.

After a year and a half of searching, Oregonian reporter Tom Hallman Jr. finally found the ideal family to illustrate his story on tracing family roots. His first thought was, This will make a great series.

His next thought was, No, it will make one great story.

Like countless others in these days of depleted newsholes, no-jump edicts and supposedly turned-off readers, Hallman no longer takes the position that reporters should write until their notes run dry and then wheedle editors into publishing the whole caboodle. In an age of McNews, full-course journalism is far from dead. But selectivity has become the watchword, and nursing major projects into the paper has emerged as a newsroom art form.

"We're writing a lot of stuff shorter so we can write some stuff longer," says Jacqui Banaszynski, a Pulitzer-winning writer who now heads the special projects team at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. "We really have to justify a long story. But if we do justify it and it's written well, we get it in."

For his project, Hallman quickly decided that one powerful narrative would stand a better chance with readers – and editors – than a series. "As a writer, I would have read a series," he said later. "But putting myself in the place of the average reader, I don't think they would have. It would have lost its power."

So Hallman produced a 90-inch Sunday blockbuster, "A Father's Legacy," that dramatically followed the Charles and Deena West family's journey back to Mississippi in search of roots and reconciliation. Complete with special layout touches, intimate photos and a scene-by-scene writing style, Hallman's piece illustrates much about what is happening with long writing these days.

If not under siege, then projects seem at least counter-trendy. The recession has brought deep newshole cuts, and many papers have reallocated space away from hard news. Technology and reader appetites have propelled front pages toward short, breezy, colorized, graphics-enhanced, non-jumping copy. Takeouts, often derided as bottomless, troublesome and just plain dull, make a big fat target for bean counters and space snatchers.

But don't bury them yet. Project journalists, always enterprising when their own words are at stake, have adapted. Most noticeably, newspapers are picking their shots, justifying every newsbank-busting mega-project with inch-by-inch scrutiny. "We're still committed to doing longer projects," says Editor Arthur S. Brisbane of the Kansas City Star, which won a Pulitzer Prize last year for a series criticizing the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "But for the Category A stuff – the very, very long in-depth pieces – we really take a careful look before taking the plunge."

Other trends include a frequent preference for the one-day spread instead of the traditional series. Strong storylines – "tale-telling," as Susan Ager of the Detroit Free Press calls them – often win out over issue packages or exposés. And to make the cut, almost any project must be compellingly written and presented, as the art of long writing assumes a status alongside the inverted pyramid.

To the degree that long writing is thriving at all, many journalists credit the stunning success of the Philadelphia Inquirer's 1991 series, "America: What Went Wrong?" by Donald Barlett and James Steele. The nine-part series, later issued as a 40-page broadsheet reprint and then turned into a bestselling book, generated 25,000 letters, demand for 400,000 reprints, and more than 365,000 book sales through eleven printings.

While Steele modestly declines to estimate the influence of the series, he does say the intense public response has resonated up the Knight-Ridder corporate ladder. "We have felt for years," Steele says, "that people do read long stories if you make them readable and interesting and tell people something they didn't know. It's a very simple formula really. And this drove that home."

Tracy Barnett, assistant director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), says that across the country "reporters are using Barlett and Steele's example to go back to their editors and say, 'Look, it can be done and readers like this sort of thing.' "

Editors, of course, crave material with both journalistic and market appeal. "I think people will read great stories," says Pioneer Press Managing Editor for News Mindi Keirnan. "At a time when people feel as disconnected as they do, a newspaper can serve as a Great Connector to help people figure out what a good course of action should be."

Says freelancer Steve Weinberg, a former IRE executive director, "I don't think it's just coincidence that some of the most profitable newspapers in the United States are the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. I think a significant number of readers want in-depth stories on a regular basis."

So while the trend toward short writing may occupy the spotlight, long writing is making its stand. Jack Hart, staff development director and writing coach at the Oregonian in Portland, puts it this way: "What we are doing is busting out of the rut in both directions – long writing and short writing. I think the problem over the last half century has been a preponderance of abstract, boring, mid-length writing." That point is underscored by a sign posted in the St. Paul newsroom reminding everyone of two top goals for this year: "Gray Screens and Centerpieces" (major projects) and "Write Tight and With Authority" (shorter ones).

Don Fry, who directs writing programs at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, says long projects pay off if they're done well. "The public talks to you about good long writing. They write to you about it," Fry says. "But most journalism is written for journalists. We write it in this strange journalistic language, so it's hard to read. And we try to pack too much into too short a space, so it's tedious to read."

Journalists differ on whether the number of major projects has held steady or fallen. Many worry about the emerging mentality among writers that long projects must clear so many newsroom hurdles and that profiles and narratives seem favored over investigations. "It's very poisonous because it gets into the mindset of reporters," says Weinberg.

"My fear is what happens if you're constantly raising the issue of, 'Do we have space?' and if you're seeing the editors constantly wringing their hands and sitting with their calculators," says Banaszynski at the Pioneer Press. "I fear that what it does is stifle creative thinking and get reporters to think too much in niblets."

Editors come across as proud of their major projects but tough-minded about space, resources and reader interests. At the Sacramento Bee, which won Pulitzers for two series last year, Managing Editor Peter Bhatia expects to do three or four major series a year with a willingness "to write stories for what they're worth." But his paper, too, has cracked down on "overwriting," including what Bhatia calls "ponderous structure" and "larding up sentences with -ly words."

If anything draws widespread agreement, it is that a principal way of getting big stories into the paper is to write them in.

The days seem numbered for what Portland's Jack Hart scorns as regurgitation journalism, in which reporters exhaustively report and then include everything from their notes in their stories. Today, writers seem highly conscious of reader impatience and of the need for story structures and techniques that will quickly engage interest. As Hart

says, "A good long piece is not just a longer version of a good short piece."

Many papers now set out to teach effective long writing that keeps readers engaged. Susan Ager, who spent 18 months as the Detroit Free Press' writing coach before recently becoming a columnist, conducted "narrative workshops" at the paper, discussing methods such as interviewing for detail and using scene-by-scene story forms. She stressed that "the requirements of a good narrative are a character or small group that readers can be led to care about very, very quickly. They have to care within the first few seconds."

Increasingly, says the Kansas City Star's Brisbane, "the center of gravity lies in the office of the projects editor." Editors prod writers into a style that is "densely informative, quick-paced, not inclined to wander along tangents."

An influential voice in the long-writing movement has been University of Oregon author and teacher Jon Franklin, who won two Pulitzers at the Evening Sun in Baltimore and whose book, "Writing for Story," sits on writers' desks everywhere. "We have got a whole generation of people now who have never written anything long coherently," says Franklin, the champion of a "story grammar" that he says has been used from Homer to Hollywood.

Journalists now spend an increasing proportion of their time on long projects perfecting the writing. Once, it wasn't uncommon for reporters to spend weeks investigating a topic and then dash off the copy in a few days. Portland's Tom Hallman, for example, used to spend about 70 percent of project time on reporting. Now, on projects such as "A Father's Legacy," the ratio is closer to half reporting and half writing. To compress his material into one story, Hallman consciously "telescoped huge chunks of information" into a few tight paragraphs, limited the number of characters and forced himself not to stray off course.

One result of such writing, according to freelance writer Bill Dedman, a Pulitzer winner for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, is that long stories are often easier to read than short ones. "I find that more readers get to the end of my 100-inch stories than my 10-inch stories," Dedman says. "Maybe you try harder with the 100-inch stories. You feel a greater burden to carry them along... I'll just try any trick imaginable to get people to go from the front of the story to the end."

Beyond narrative structure and scene-by-scene construction, writers seek detail, concrete examples and rich anecdotes. What struck many readers about the Barlett-Steele series was the way the authors punctuated the voluminous economic data with arresting everyday illustrations. "We tried to point to someone's life," recalls Steele, "to make it meaningful based on actual data. That takes time.

"The most important thing about a long story is this: The energy required to make it readable is extraordinary."

Side-by-side with strong writing goes today's exacting attention to design. It's rare for a long project to be displayed as one continuous article spanning column after column of gray type. More often, stories are divided into digestible chunks, with display headlines for each segment. Color, art and graphics convey critical information as well as enhancing the presentation.

For instance, St. Paul this year published a six-part series on campaign spending, "Bankrolling the Legislature," that triggered demand for 12,000 reprints. Based on computer analyses of thousands of campaign contributions, the series included charts, graphs, lists, maps, drawings, summaries, chronologies and all sorts of breakout boxes. Most days, the main story ran only 40 inches or so, with sidebars and breakouts carrying additional information. But all told, the reprint took 28 pages.

The idea was to let readers use as much material as they wanted. "For those who wanted to be fully informed, we had that," says Pioneer Press Managing Editor Keirnan. "For those who can only stick with the 40-inch story on day one, they knew the worst of it."

Strong writing and presentation are all to the good, of course. But many journalists worry about the potential downside. Not every series lends itself to a snappy lead and sexy display.

While double-Pulitzer winners such as Barlett and Steele have the clout to engineer a mega-package on the economy, many other reporters fear their editors' eyes would glaze over at such an idea. Topics such as the savings and loan crisis, famine in Africa, the federal deficit or the rise of AIDS may not have seemed compelling in their early stages, but it's fair to say the press should have locked onto them much earlier. Over the long term, to sacrifice serious investigations and issue pieces could undermine public faith in the press.

Yet many writers and editors agree that more scrutiny was overdue. As Portland's Tom Hallman says, "A couple of years ago, I did a series that ran Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. By Tuesday, even I got tired of the story."

"I see this as being a benefit of the demographic changes and bad economy," says Sacramento's Peter Bhatia. "It's made us all think more than we used to about writing.

"A year ago, I was beginning to feel like the five-part mega-series was dead. Then I read some of ours and others that were really good and really compelling. I'm not feeling as strongly about that as I was."

So don't say the last rites for long writing. Many people are optimistic.

"Writing short, where explanation isn't necessary, allows you to write long when it is," says Poynter's Don Fry. "I think there's a terrific future for long writing... If you write long and do it well, readers like to read it..and writers like to write it." l