Eleven Hundred Two Words
According to the New York Times, lately magazines are increasingly using less and less written content, focusing almost entirely on graphic elements (i.e. photography). This isn’t really surprising to me, having stared at other magazines like Nest and Nerve for hours at a time during the Dec redesig (I also have been known to peruse Stuff on occasion). The most interesting part of the article was this, right at the end:
The assumption is that readers raised on a media diet in which they are presented with a new image every few tenths of a second are not about to wait 3,400 words for the upshot. The glossy publishing industry will continue to serve as the back fence for mass culture. But in these days of postliterate publishing, few in the neighborhood seem to have time to stop and tell stories.
One of the things you have to wonder about is, how much of this can be blamed on the web? If there’s one thing that all the usability guidelines for the web agree on, it’s that you shouldn’t have too much content on any given page. Usually, the amount of text on a page, according to these guidelines, should be between two and four screens on a page (the Times article is roughly five and a half on my computer). This isn’t too exact, especially with all the differences in monitors today, but it’s really not a whole lot of text.
It’s true that you can link together multiple pages for longer articles, but what sites really do that? The Times and other newspapers do so; the New Yorker and other magzines; salon.com and one or two other sites. Most of these sites have real life counterparts; only salon is a web publication. Feed and Suck, which specialized in the longer-form articles, no longer exist. And salon’s articles typically aren’t normally that long on a day-to-day basis (although it’s possible that the premium articles normally are, but I don’t pay for Salon Premium so I wouldn’t know).
Whether it’s a matter of bandwidth or a matter of time for writing and production, most sites can’t afford to put up these longer articles. Those that do, eventually burn out (we all know how many times I’ve stopped updating websites). People who work for one of these sites, or try to run their own, could have developed a dislike for the longer form article. It’s tough to write 4,000 words on a daily–or even a weekly–basis, especially if you need to get other things done. Websites that focus on longer, more literary articles often don’t even want to try for articles as long as the old magazines would carry. McSweeneys specifically asks for articles not more than 1,000 words (though only if you want to be published on the website; the print magazine takes longer works). So writers get used to writing shorter articles; designers get more used to preparing shorter articles for web publication. To believe that there’s no overlap between web and print workers is foolish, so it’s not hard to imagine that web tendencies carried over into physical media over the past six years. Even if any designer that works on the web never returns to print, there’s a more than even chance that print editors would be influenced by stuff happening in an Internet Explorer window.
There’s also the fact that the web is, inherently, a visual medium. Just about every site has some graphic elements, reducing the text to a small column that can be quickly scanned. This isn’t unusual in the print world either; it’s just that, on paper, you can have multiple columns stacked next to each other. You can’t do that very easily on paper. So even a magazine that has a very simple, non-graphical layout in the real world is going to have sidebars, title graphics and banner ads on the website. Again, assuming that designers occasionally work on the both websites and magazines, you’re going to see this type of design flourish in print as well. (Personally, I wanted a sidebar in the Dec’s scene section, but I didn’t get my wish.)
Finally, there’s the influence of weblogs and discussion sites. Slashdot (which is, essentially, a weblog about technical issues) usually has content no longer than a paragraph or two; much more written words are available from the comments, but they are often repetitive and read less often. Metafilter’s entries are typically just a sentence or two. Weblogs vary greatly, from short little blurby things to, well, long essays like this one, but definitely lean towards the former. Now: it’s true that most people probably don’t read Slashdot or make the rounds of weblogs every day. It’s also true that these sites primarily point people to other sites where there is, presumably, more content. However, these “glorified captions” have gotten an entire population to the point where they like to read little blurbs versus long, detailed articles. Is this population directly responsible for the slow evolution from text-heavy to picture-heavy magazines? Personally, I don’t think so: I highly doubt that most of the people who read these sites don’t occasionally pick up and read a magazine or a long article in a newspaper. But for pleasure reading, who knows? Certainly, web readers are picking up a new attitude of “better entertain me in a few screens or else I’m going back to that other site,” and there are a whole lot of people that read the web.
In the end, I’m not entirely sure how much the web is responsible for shorter articles, but I’m convinced we’re somewhat responsible. The Times article doesn’t specify it, but this is a trend that has been carrying on for years. Televison, then Cable, then MTV, then Entertainment Tonight and People (I think I’ve got that order mixed up…whatever, it’s four in the morning)–the shortened pieces have been developing for years, and the web has only hastened it. Web content is almost always shorter than 4,000 words; this article is probably only around 800 or so. Can we say the web hasn’t made our attention spans run out quicker? Can we say it hasn’t adapted us to wanting more graphics around our text? Can we say that we aren’t going to want these qualities in print publications as well?
I don’t think we can. We all knew the World Wide Web was going to change printed media in an unprescidented way; I just wasn’t expecting it to happen by dumbing-down our magazines into glorified picture books.