Susan Kille

As breaking news headlines exploded in Japan, Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere, ProPublica on Wednesday night held its first live event, “Long-Form Storytelling in a Short-Attention-Span World.”

A panel of journalists representing different media and different business models but bound by livelihoods of telling stories thoroughly and well, agreed that there is a future for long-form reporting. Here, insert a sigh of relief and the link to the video.

“Long-form is absolutely not dead, what is dead is bad long-form,” Stephen Engelberg, the managing editor of ProPublica, told the audience that packed the New School’s Tishman Auditorium. He recalled the days of monopoly newspapers that presented  “take it or leave it” investigative pieces by “stacking one fact on top and they would be endlessly dense and they would be unreadable.”

“In this world we do not have that option,” he said. “If we would try at ProPublica to present complicated stories that way, no one would read them and they would have no impact and we are about impact.”

“The new era of all these choices tends to crowd out badly done, poorly executed journalism but that’s not so bad,” he said.

The 24-hour news cycle “is not innately bad,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, which recently published a 24,000-word piece on the Church of Scientology that most in the audience indicated they had read. “I don’t think one knocks out the other.”

Engelberg interjected that “one enhances the other.”

“The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly, complicated place and it keeps moving on from crisis, to strangeness, to beauty to weirdness to tragedy,” Remnick said. “The caravan keeps moving on. The job of the long form-writer, filmmaker or  radio broadcaster is to stop, is to pause and when the caravan goes away, that’s where the good stuff comes.”

For example: Engelberg said he has read many accounts of what is happening at the Japan nuclear plants but still doesn’t understand it; “I’m waiting for that long-form story, that New Yorker piece, that piece with drama and characters, to put it together for me.”

Raney Aronson-Rath, series senior producer of Frontline, said that her PBS show deals with much-reported topics like the unrest in Egypt or the disaster in Japan by stepping back, finding an original angle of vision and writing more knowingly. “You’ve seen this but what you didn’t know, was that what was happening at that time was X.”

What does it take to be a long-form journalist? No formulas were revealed.

“Great stories happen to people who can tell them,” said Ira Glass, host and producer of This American Life.

Long-form journalism requires  “different planes of regard and angles of vision,” Remnick said. His advice was to “read endlessly” and to examine how affects are achieved by “reading like a writer” – a lesson he learned as a college student from a class taught by John McPhee, who he now works with. “I don’t understand people who want to be writers but don’t really read very much.”

Reporting is “the least romantic thing” and “a lot of shear labor” that requires a “willingness to go at it and at it and at it” to seek out a specific interview or fact, Remnick said. “Without that kind of dumb stubbornness – do something else.”

Engelberg said that when hiring he looks for people who can think critically, write in a way that moves him and puts no stock in formal journalism training.

“Start making stuff” is the advice Glass offered. He said he developed his skills by asking others to review his work, sometimes taking them out to dinner or outright paying them. He said $100 could get a helpful critique, representing a big savings from graduate school.

Alison Stewart, the moderator and co-anchor of PBS’s Need To Know, asked about paying for lengthy reporting and editing projects.

“Money is actually the biggest threat to long-firm journalism,”  Stewart said,  noting that former New York Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati once said a cover story could cost $40,000. She went on to say her own year-old show is threatened by funding cuts being considered in Congress.

Aronson-Rath said changes in technology are “saving documentary filmmaking.”  Television is still expensive, she said. but being able to transform journalists into directors and producers is a “fundamental economic shift.”

“One of the more exciting things for me in the last few years is watching the new generation of reporter who is into filmmaking actually doing the filmmaking themselves,” she said.

Technology does not cut costs everywhere.  Engelberg said that in investigative work, which can take many months to produce, “$40,000 is cheap, cheap, cheap.”  ProPublica, a nonprofit, has worked on projects with both Frontline and This America Life.

“What we are seeing as the industry is rearranging itself is people pulling back from that,” Engelberg said. He said that when he began working at The Oregonian, there were 420 editorial employees and today there are less than 200. “You can’t do the same work with half the number of people particularly when you are asking them, by the way, to do twice as much.”

“I do not believe at the moment that I see a for-profit venture that can do what we do with 19 reporters and make a large profit from that,” Engelberg said.