While cute animal antics seduce more eyeballs, the long narrative still has a few fans
“Hey Google! Tell me the news,” Cass Yurich, a fourth-year social work student at Toronto Metropolitan University, calls out over the sound of running water in the kitchen sink. The smell of her breakfast lingers in the air as she rinses dishes of their soapy suds. The voices of the newscasters recede into the background, delivering neat summaries of the day’s major news stories.
Then, late at night, after a long day of reading, Yurich finds herself in bed scrolling through a never-ending TikTok stream of comedic bits, cooking edits, and the antics of cute animals. “If something is longer than a page or two,” says Yurich, “it might not make me want to read more.”
It’s not just at the end of a long day. Our overall ability to focus on longer texts may be in jeopardy. According to a 2022 report by King’s College London, 49 percent of adults felt that their attention span had become shorter than in the past. Forty-seven percent felt that “deep thinking,” or a collective capability of deeper thought, also had become a thing of the past. And 73 percent felt that various forms of media were in a “non-stop” state of competing for their attention. People have taken to the internet to bemoan their inability to focus on a two-and-a-half hour long movie, wondering if they’re the only ones. Others find themselves no longer able to get through a book.
Never mind an entire book. Various forms of media are so in competition for our attention that it often can seem as if journalism, long-form journalism especially, is not even in the arena to win eyeballs. And yet, the long narrative hangs on. Nour Abi-Nakhoul, editor-in-chief of Maisonneuve, says that while she recognizes the push to make journalism more palatable for social media, as the editor of a long-form publication she defends longer reads. That’s because she doesn’t think short-form content is capable of filling the desire to experience in-depth content. “People will always have an appetite for creative, narrative-driven, human-driven, long-form stories,” she says. “I don’t think that will ever go away.”
There is research to suggest this might be the case. A 2016 Pew Research Center study found that stories longer than 1,000 words engaged people more than shorter news articles. The people surveyed spent twice as much time reading long-form stories, with engagement levels varying based on factors such as story topic and how they came across it. This is true for Yurich, who says subject matter and the way it is delivered are paramount. “It really does depend on the topic,” she says. “If I’m going to digest long-form media, I need to know why I should stick with it.”
Amelia Schonbek, features editor at Hazlitt, notes there are several kinds of long-form stories that work to engage different kinds of readers. “There are so many types of long magazine writing. The audience for an 8,000-word celebrity profile could be very broad. A 10,000-word investigative piece about the South China Sea, which is something I just read in the New Yorker last week, is probably more niche.”
Schonbek also echoes Abi-Nakhoul in the belief that there is a level of depth to long-form writing that cannot be recreated through short-form content like TikTok. “That type of reporting, where somebody just has time to sink into a community and really try to understand what’s going on, it’s anthropological in its scope,” she says. “It allows a story to guide readers through a depth and specificity of information about, oftentimes, a community that those readers otherwise wouldn’t be familiar with. None of that is possible in two minutes.”
Abi-Nakhoul also suggests that long-form writing offers a different vessel for readers to get a grasp on difficult issues. “It can provide a narrative-based angle that helps people break into quite complex subjects and understand them in a more human and visceral way.”
While there is value in all types of journalistic content, regardless of length, they are not interchangeable. Whenever writers immerse themselves in stories to deliver a rich narrative, there will be an audience for it.
About the author
Shaki Sutharsan is a Tamil-Canadian journalist and writer currently completing her studies at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU). Along with working with the Review of Journalism as co-Head of Research, she is an online editor for TMU’s independent student newspaper The Eyeopener. She previously worked with CBC News and Toronto-based hyperlocal news outlet The Green Line. Follow her on X @shakisuth.
