Pe scurt

Against ‘Long-Form Journalism’ by James Bennet

Length is hardly the quality that most meaningfully classifies these stories. Yet there’s a real conundrum here: If long-form doesn’t fit, what term is elastic enough to encompass the varied journalism it has come to represent, from narrative to essay, profile to criticism? And how do you account for the blurring of boundaries as work from the digital realm energizes and reshapes traditional forms of journalism? For the first time this year, a purely digital magazine,Slate, won a National Magazine Award in head-to-head competition with print magazines, for the crisp authority of Dahlia Lithwick’s commentary on the Supreme Court. Consider, also, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who won the award for one of the oldest forms of magazine writing, the essay. That may have looked like a straightforward old-school triumph, but it wasn’t. The morning after he won, Coates wrote a blog post thanking his commenters for their help over the years as, on TheAtlantic.com, he worked through the ideas that ultimately cohered to form the essay. Noting that The Atlantic had also won the National Magazine Award for best website, Coates wrote, “In my mind, these awards are linked. Writing for the Web site has fundamentally changed how I write in print.”