SB Nation pulls Daniel Holtzclaw longform piece

Shot - that sentence stood out to me too.

My new boss is fluent in Corporate-speak. One similarity with Longform seems to be the notion that 'long = better.'

 

Everybody is a damn comedian on that medium.
It's like that was the mask chosen best to present the writer in his resting state.
I'd rather see a writerly writer treating what he does on par with Jonas Salk than the endless stream of bad jokes.

 

Glenn Stout Lives Way Up There | The Classical

The guy is practically depicted as Yoda in this piece.
I think Field of Drams is the only movie where the writer doesn't live out in the middle of nowhere.

 

Right. From all accounts, there were only a few people actually in charge of the longform site. One of them goes on vacation knowing this story is in the final stages and about to be published. Make yourself available. Somehow. Phone, e-mail, something. Or, knowing the work schedule for those few people, maybe hold the story until everyone can provide complete and final input. Why rush it? This all seems so damn elementary. What a weird, weird situation.

 

Comedians and Socratic-style debate champions.

 

Any chance Stout couldn't see the forest because of the trees? Worried more about the mechanics of the piece instead of the themes and makeup?

I don't think there's a lot of excuses for Arnold's awful attempt - from pitch to print. I'll be stunned if ever writes anything beyond basic gamers and sidebars the rest of his career.

 

It sounds like because Spencer Hall is a great writer, he ascended to a position where management skills -- working with a lot of other people in an office setting and forming consensus -- are everything he wouldn't have done as a writer.

So at least it's like a traditional newspaper job in that sense.

 

Mr. Charles P. Pierce: "One thing that drives me crazy, and this is especially true in newspapers, is the notion that you should take your best writer and "promote" him to be an editor. This is idiotic, and it happens all the time, and nine times out of ten you lose a good writer and end up with a mediocre editor. You can no more "promote" a writer to be an editor than you can "promote" a plumber to be a gardener. Totally different skill sets. Just to use one example—I am the world's worst editor. Every change I make in a piece of copy makes the piece sound like I wrote it, and we all know how popular that phenomenon is with writers. The ability to work within a writer's voice while leaving no fingerprints is a talent as far beyond me as landscape painting is. In between counting beans and worrying about the Internet, the people who run America's newspapers should get off their ass, identify their best young editors, and train them AS EDITORS."

 

That of course would require money and resources.

Old guy take:

I recall a journalism world that operated just fine without the term "longform," which to me was, at least as originally used, just a silly contrivance to distinguish anew and justify the work of a handful of great feature writers who could (at a time when the conventional Web publishing wisdom was demanding shorter and shorter stories for reasons including clicks and attention span) break through the clutter and hold a reader's interest with a well-constructed and polished feature story.

Back in the day, we used to call them magazine stories. Gary Smith and a small group of others pulled them off quite nicely. We used to subscribe to Sports Illustrated to read them. We used to marvel about the meticulous editing and fact checking and, yes, expense of publishing these pieces. Many of us aspired to be the next Smith but realistically we knew there were (and probably should be) few jobs like his and we understood that the requisite demand, talent pool and expense for this writing would limit it to a few platforms like SI that could support it. But if you were talented enough and worked passionately with great editors and learned from them, well, just maybe you could get there.

Then came the Web with its infinite space and inevitable devaluation of writing and editing. At first, the great feature writers were limited online to the web side of print giants. But eventually, of course, there were Web publications with far less resources than needed to execute this kind of writing but still wanted to try to get in the game; to cloak themselves with the credibility that great feature writing brought the print giants. From a business standpoint, they needed to separate themselves from the multitude of sites running wire stories and blogs written by low-paid teams of aggregators.

So there just had to be ways to deliver something that at least approximated this kind of content (another term I hate because of what it implies about writing and journalism) less expensively. Right? Afterall, there were still plenty of people who aspired to do this kind of work and who would gladly do it for less money with less and lesser quality editing.

Lesson: You get what you pay for.

 

Is that like the difference between what you get with a hooker in Gotham compared to what you get with a hooker in Trenton?

 

My old place used to give a quarterly staff award for "distinguished journalism." It was about as blatant a way as there is to say "stuff we wrote solely to win national recognition."

No daily beat writers need apply.

 

Yes, have seen the same garbage. It was great for office morale.
Always wondered where the award plaques went when the paper's physical operations downsized.