"Their content shows a willingness to explore tangents and not be bound by strictly linear presentation. The typical Believer essay - to the extent that such a thing can exist, given the magazine's commitment to the idiosyncrasy and multiplicity of voices - ranges and explores, collecting curiosities and offhand insights on its way to an argument and taking as much time, and as many words, as it needs. This formal elasticity is central to The Believer's critique of other magazines and the speeded-up, superficial culture of reading they sustain."
-from a NYTmag article on The Believer and n+1
Nelson Muntz (of The Simpons fame) once intoned to a print journalist, "Ha-ha, your medium is dying!" So, what about the rest of print? How can the bookish brigades not be happy with new finding that people are reading more these days? Well, they say that we read less of the "good stuff" than ever before. It is sometimes difficult to ascertain what exactly they mean by this... short stories, poetry, what? It seems to me that the factions of the literati sounding these alarms are almost always partisans of the novel. "Woe is fiction and its writers!", they all cry. Not to be too insensitive, but more now that ever, I find myself saying, "Fuck the novel! What about the essay?"
Novels, as smart as their writers and critics may be, still represent forms of artsy entertainment to me. I find that the love of essays is a more general barometer of intellectual appreciation. Fiction has plenty of value in its own right and I'm glad that some folks enjoy it enough to devote their lives to it, but I'm just not sure that it regularly advances its readers' sophistication of thought about the world around them. Look, I like stories as much as next person, but I'd rather spend my time indulging in straight forward insight and analysis of current cultural trends. I don't need Blood Diamond as a cinematic vehicle to help me digest the dizzying array of problems confronting West Africa. What I need is a small dose of decent research elegantly woven into a good old fashioned essay. I can learn more from reading one high quality essay than I can from a whole day of watching television or newspaper immersion. Still, I'm worried that essays aren't faring any better than the other kinds of long-form writing these days.
Essays are something the writerly classes should be able to unite around. They're one of the primary modes of communication they use to interact with each other in print. We all know by now that journalists, the flag bearing professionals of the lot, have been hurt by the vast accessibility of free online content. Although freelancers, the primary writers of essays, might not be doing as badly as the newspaper staffers who've found themselves on the chopping block in recent years, things all around are still looking grim. I cannot argue against Nick Carr's point that the large investigative reports once characteristic of our best periodicals might be inexorably on the wane due. Ironically, "news" readership continues to rise and doesn't show any signs of stalling. The public seems to love being fed blurbs: the inane headlines on yahoo, newscrawlers, and blogosphere-powered social media outlets like Digg.
It often makes me chuckle to think how Google Reader really discourages reading. It does what most information efficiency technologies strive to do - allowing readers to cross more stuff off their self assigned reading lists by encouraging the thin technique of title/first paragraph skimming. Publishers seem to think that by limiting the amount of content per post they allow feed aggregators like Reader to pull in, they will bait us into wanting to read the entire article, thus driving more traffic to their site. While I'm sure this works to some extent, by attempting to inconvenience readers on their quest for more and more quick and easy text, they inadvertently further ingrain the skimming mentality. Will this help kill their medium? That might be jumping to conclusions, but it is hard to imagine that it will help in any way
I wonder whether the essay has a bright future. How many people today would say they enjoy reading essays, let alone claim to be able make a living writing them? Most of them still associate them with high school English class or even worse, the written portions on the new generation of standardized tests. Perhaps it is their often meandering course that makes them so inaccessible to this generation of readers. Maybe they are just too long. If anything, pushing writing outlets further into the online abyss will continue to shorten the average length of their bread and butter content. This isn't just due to those annoying page breaks online which result in more fractions of cents being earned for the few additional advertising impressions they generate. It'd owing more to the mentality of people who do most of their reading online.
When I say "mentality", what I really mean is "attention habits". If ever you take the opportunity to observe the daily information gathering behavior of a seasoned online reader, you'll quickly see how different it is from someone who sits down to read the Sunday New York Times over brunch. Even if their content was similar in bulk, breadth, and quality (though it isn't), the web reader will be much more prone to skimming and jumping from piece to piece. While this may represent a more efficient information processing mechanism and is still notably better than just scanning listings of top headlines, it doesn't constitute a rebuttal to the charge of technologically induced ADD, that is, excessively expedient, superficial reading habits.
How could essays, those wordy and high concept behemoths, ever hope to get real readership while housed in this same medium, among their increasingly pared and beaten down journalistic brethren? Publishers realize this is a problem, so they often limit online access to essays. This further reduces public access and any chance of "conversion", especially where younger readers are concerned. The good news is that those of us who want to read them for free can still go to the local chain bookstore and track down all the magazines where Brijit told us we'd find the coolest sounding stories. Honestly, I've only bought something from Books a Million once, in order to obtain lifetime free wifi access so it could serve as a (free) supplement my university's library. I feel bad for magazine publishers and their poor writers, but not bad enough to purchase all the products that I read. Their best bet would be to keep the magazine off the shelves and the full text well guarded on their own websites. If their circulation numbers continue to fall, maybe they will.
The reason quality essays aren't more widely read is partly because their meandering style is just tough to sell to mass audiences. This is especially true online, where you generally need a hook at the end of each page to motivate the reader to keep clicking ahead to the next one. A novel's only hope of being turned into something more accessible is a talented screenwriter with decent film connections. The essay needs something similar, though also something distinct from the multimedia that sometimes is found to accompany exposes and reviews, its cousin nonfiction forms. It would seem that timelessness might be its most valuable quality, but I doubt this to be adequate to ensure its survival in any healthy manner. Perhaps more importantly, it might more easily lend itself to animation. The Internet increasingly demands that the "flat" nature of pure text needs to be "reanimated". Essays may represent the writing medium best suited for a cheap and easy multimedia retrofitting.
What I propose is selling publishers audiovisual enhancements of their content that can drive traffic to their websites, differentiate their print and digital materials, and bundle interactive marketing enhancements with their products. This would entail overlaying images and interactive material on top of narration of their essays. Mockups could be easily done with low end video editing software, but to make it more unique and proprietary, Flash would be best. Some corollary examples include Magnum photo essays or SlateV.
This is what magazines need to successfully make the transition online without cannibalizing their own content and revenue. We might label this as a foray into visual journalism, but more so than than in the case of journalistic photo essays, it should add a very particular flavor to the message. This flavor can also be altered for different audiences, to extenuate particular points (or digressions), and potentially to control the "shock" level of content. I would love to facilitate these transformative services and products for free via creative commons licenses, but after investigating the copyright issues and the line between fair use and a derivative work, I think this clearly falls on the side of the latter. Am I saddened? No, because I think the authors deserve the traffic that youtube or similar outlets likely wouldn't provide for them. If all goes exceedingly well, publishers would likely end up making the best content freely accessible anyway.
How might this operate as a more formalized business model? A website could be easily designed to both advertise the service to publishers and provide a platform through which they could play a role in the creative process. Once they have shown enough interest to provide the full text of a particular article, we could run a screenwriting contest from which the publishers (and potentially collaborating authors) would choose a winner. They would then choose narrators and animators from listings (complete with portfolios) on our site and have them produce the final product. All these producers would set their own rates (possibly through an internal bidding system) for particular products and we would negotiate a separate fee with the publishers.
What other forces besides changes in print production processes and public reading habits might drive demand for this kind of content? One potentially synergistic trend is the amount of archival materials periodicals are putting on their websites these days. Another is the reemergence of intellectual magazines such as The Believer and N+1, which wholly embrace the long essay form, but thus far have established only weak web presences to complement it. Speaking of this reemergence, it might also be possible to exhume and reinvigorate some content from their predecessors, many of whom went bust in the dot com bubble and were never resurrected: Might, The Baffler, Lingua Franca, Feed. Yet another is the growing popularity of documentaries, animated films, and graphic novels, of which the most innovative (read: least oriented towards persuasion) have a similar bent. I also just came across the phenomena of "Vladmasters", which is summarized via the below excerpt from the March 2008 issue of The Believer.
The artist who goes by the name Vladimir is one of the only known filmmakers working with View-Masters, which, if you remember, are those cheap-looking toy binoculars usually filled with images of zoo animals or dinosaurs. Instead of watching her so-called films on movie screens, audience members hold “stereoscopic viewing devices” up to their eyes and click through picture reels of dioramas, action figures, and abstract photographs of trains. Through her website, Vladimir mails her handmade films around the world, each one accompanied by a spoken-narration CD and sound track. Her “picture stories” have included adaptations of Calvino and Kafka, along with some of her own writing, like the one about the pseudo-mystical congregation of farming machinery. She claims to “seek out the forgotten, the discarded, and the overlooked objects of this world… and [takes] tiny, tiny photographs in order to tell their stories.”
Sure, what I'm talking about can easily be construed as art, film, or just multimedia enhancement of the written word. This doesn't mean that it will take "artists" to produce though. Given the scarcity of resources in the letters industry, this kind of work needs to be priced somewhat affordably. I only think that it will be possible if the storyboarding costs equal that of the illustrators/animators/montage makers. Luckily, the latter work can seemingly be outsourced to secure a labor rate of around $10/hr. Like all my ideas though, this one can't be vetted until a few demonstration projects have been tried. I have some essay candidates, but I'll need to secure permission from their publishers, find some talented screenwriters, and hire an animator to make them come to life. At that point it will be more clear whether adding extra Flash interactivity will financially feasible and complementary to the overall feel of the work.
There are also lots of emerging web applications which could help move the production process along, like Omnisio, Jumpcut, the Google Image Ripper, etc.
Production Phases:
1) Secure publishers' permission and interest
2) Choose a narrator
3) Hold Screenwriting contest
4) storyboarding/animation/montage making
5) Add potential flash effects
