News Fix # 49: short versus long
I'm back with your weekly news fix, and I'm happy we're in this together. If you're new here, welcome! Get in touch anytime; I would love to hear from you.
I complain a lot that too many news stories are too long. I often want to read about 50% less than I'm offered in everything from straight-forward reports to features to magazine pieces. I feel this way about books, too, but that's more recent. It has more to do with my inability to get even half way through The Brothers Karamazov for the past year.
News stories and books feeling too long make me feel similarly frustrated, but the genesis of that frustration is totally different. Reading Dostoyevsky is work I choose to do—something I want but don't need. My lazy brain might rebel anyway, but this is completely a me problem.
When I read a long news story, however, I'm being compelled by some kind of need. I'm looking for something I think I have to know, better understand, or maybe act on. The writer of a news story, especially a long one, is gambling that sandwiching important information inside a narrative, making a lot of their reporting visible, and explaining context will enhance the readers experience. It doesn't always pay off. Sometimes all that other work is just more to wade through.
A brief message, a visualization, a video, or even a look-up tool (the wage theft monitor and this tool to check for spyware on your phone are great examples) are often more helpful ways to meet information needs.
I know this. I preach this. But I am only an imperfect human, so now I find myself embarking on several longer-form projects.
I am doing my best to interrogate if each of these projects really needs to be a longer written piece. I'm pushing myself along the way to ask myself if there are better ways to convey the information that I'm also capable of pulling off. But the biggest question I'm trying to answer is: what might a reader gain by spending more time with this information and these ideas?
There's science to lead me here; effortful learning can be deeper learning, for example. And yet, as only an imperfect human, I also want to be unscientific and rely on my experience, too. During the last few weeks I've been breaking down what made the longer form pieces I've most enjoyed feel necessary. Use them as a TLDR or an invitation to spend more of your time with these pieces.
What the comfort class doesn't get, Xochitl Gonzalez, The Altantic (paywalled). All the pieces I've invested in have in common is that they were recommended to me by at least one person I trust and who knows me well. It's a heuristic for future value with the added benefit of perhaps developing some shared ideas or shared references with somebody I like. This piece was recommended by multiple people, and I love Gonzalez's writing, so the investment was an easy decision. The premise feels obvious: that people with the security born of wealth can craft a worldview and sometimes real-world conditions based on an innacurate view of the world. It could have been a T-shirt, so why did I appreciate the length here (just shy of 2000 words)? She kept me curious with new takes on class conflict. I needed her to stoke my curiosity so I could take in her more subtle and more durable idea—that nobody wants to accept reality. The comfort class just can keep it at bay for longer.
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan, Grove Atlantic. The story here unfolds over a tight 128 pages, short for a book but still an investment by the reader. Here the length is necessary not because Keegan's point is subtle but because it's difficult to accept. This book is about complicity and complacency. Each of us, almost every day, accepts something we wonder if we should push back on. This experience is as painful as it is universal. The time we spend with Keegan's characters is just enough for us to accompany them as they are overwhelmed by trying to pay our bills, do right by the people we love, and in this case, prepare for Christmas. Systematic abuse and cruelty by the Catholic Church happening under your nose is perhaps not something you want to be asked to rekon with. Small Things Like These is just the right length for the truth of how human it is to be complacent about harm to land gently, as the encouragement to choose a different path to feel possible.
Who Will Monetize the Truth, Francesco Marconi, AppliedXL. This piece is more dense and more challenging than the others, but great. It's a sensemaking piece for anybody interested in the future structure of information and AI businesses. The main point is that news is splitting into three different functions: an intelligence business, an attention aggregator, and a public good generator. Each function has a different potential for creating value and making money. Marconi, to my delight, does not think value creation and making money are synonymous. The paper is 30 pages that validates and challenges and throws in new ideas besides. This is a piece I will continue to come back to so I can spend even more time with these ideas.
If there's something you've read recently that you think was the perfect length, will you tell me what it was and why you thought that? I'd appreciate it.
Until next week, take care.