Other Voices, Other Views

Is This Column Short Enough?

Why publishers must start tackling conventional wisdom.

Summer 2010 By Paul B. Brown

You can go the cliché route: “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” You can take the high road and cite Einstein: “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” Or you simply can say: “If it is broke, do fix it.”

But no matter how you get there, you would think that the nation’s publishers, like any other business that is struggling, would be scrambling for new thoughts to get themselves out of their slump. But instead of creating the future, they are waiting for someone else to solve their problems.

The white knight who was going to save them last year—but didn’t—was micropayments. The idea, publishers hoped, was that readers would go to a central clearinghouse and pay pennies, or even fractions of pennies, to read magazine articles online. Internal squabbling over pricing has been just one obstacle that has kept that from happening. (Is an article in the National Enquirer worth the same as one in Esquire?) Today’s new hope is the iPad. By making it easy to order articles online—quick, name a major publisher that has not created an iPad app—there is hope that a new magazine age will dawn.

The problem with this approach, whether you sell magazines or mashed potatoes, is that hoping and wishing is not a strategy. You would think publishers would be trying to shape their own destiny. Yet there are few signs that they are, other than to advertise—ironically, in large part in magazines—that we (you and I) “surf the Internet” but “swim in magazines.”

Well, since publishers aren’t willing to come up with any radically new ideas, let me suggest one: Why not question a concept that the industry takes as a given—that people simply don’t read long magazine articles anymore. The most intriguing stuff out there recently has been extremely long articles. Here are some quick examples worth your attention.

Bloomberg Markets, which focuses on professional investors—and knowing what those guys are doing is educational for the rest of us—consistently runs pieces longer than any at finance magazines aimed at consumers. A February article on the sweetheart deals that the phenomenally profitable Goldman Sachs got from both New York State and City appears particularly timely in light of the current SEC investigation into the firm.

According to Christine Harper’s article, Goldman came away with a quarter billion dollars in incentives and lowered interest costs to keep its headquarters in lower Manhattan. This, Harper points out, was on top of the $12.9 billion the firm received from the federal bailout of AIG, $30 billion in FDIC debt guarantees, and $10 billion from the Treasury during the financial crisis. (Although, to be fair, the company repaid the $10 billion from the Treasury with interest.)

It is an intriguing look that brought to life one of my grandmother’s favorite sayings: “The rich always get richer.” (Alas, not all Bloomberg publications, as we will see in a moment, are taking this in-depth approach.)

The Templeton Foundation’s In Character, “a journal of everyday virtues,” devotes each issue to a single desirable quality, with longish articles that examine the theme from numerous angles. For example, in the magazine’s winter issue on humility, former Wall Street Journal editor Naomi Schaefer Riley questions whether society values academics too highly. University of Tennessee professor Wilfred M. McClay takes the theme head on and asks if humility is a virtue at all. (I wonder what the folks at Goldman Sachs would say.)

Meanwhile, as Harvard Business Review seems to be adding more and more short pieces, publications put out by management consulting firms—The McKinsey Quarterly, Booz & Co.’s strategy+business, Korn/Ferry’s new Briefings on Talent & Leadership—continue to feature full-length stories, and no one is running screaming into the night.

Even Sports Illustrated, whose articles tend to be fairly short, breaks form now and then with excellent results. Longtime sports writer Frank Deford’s nearly six-thousand-word (eight magazine pages) article in March summing up his nearly fifty-year career was compelling, even if you are not a huge Deford fan (and I am not). And a recent cover story on the Philadelphia Phillies’ Roy Halladay is the best thing I have ever read on him—and I read a lot because for my money, he is the best pitcher in baseball. (Don’t tell my fellow Yankee fans.)

But all these moves are contrary to the trend, as witnessed by the latest redesign of BusinessWeek, now Bloomberg Businessweek. With much fanfare back in April, the magazine’s editor, Josh Tyrangiel, announced the goal of creating “an indispensable magazine.” And how would the staff manage that? “We’re going to double the number of stories . . . and increase the size of each issue by 25%.” Simple math means that on the whole, the articles are going to be shorter.

The decision to scale back in-depth journalism is one of those things that on the surface seems to make sense. People are busy, and print information is losing ground to things like social media—which can communicate in 140 characters—and so the knee-jerk reaction of folks at a struggling publication like BusinessWeek is: Who the heck has time to read five thousand words on anything? And so we get Bloomberg Businessweek.

But the move is analogous to what newspapers did decades before. Concerned that they were losing readers—and that the readers that they had were getting progressively older—papers cut back on news, made articles shorter, and added more lifestyle and entertainment coverage in an attempt to attract younger readers who didn’t much like newspapers in the first place.

The result? The younger audience still didn’t read newspapers, the older ones got cranky that publishers had weakened their product, and newspapers as we know them became an endangered species.

Alienating your core customers is never a good thing. Neither is waiting for someone else to save you. When your industry is in trouble, it is time to reexamine everything. A solid first step is to scrutinize everything you assume to be true, such as readers hating long articles. As Mark Twain, who wasn’t known as a business consultant but maybe should have been, said: “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.”