The Maxim Way

"Does Size Matter?" by Michael Scherer and "The Curse of Tom Wolfe" by Michael Shapiro, in Columbia Journalism Review (Nov.–Dec. 2002), 200 Alton Pl., Marion, Ohio 43302.

In our breakneck jet-set age, long-form magazine articles have shrunk so much that in some places they’ve poof! disappeared entirely, leaving only contrails of photos, captions, and ads. What remains is the Maxim model, bitesized advice pieces, space-devouring illustrations, and grab ‘n’ go anecdotes, perfect for the "chronically over-stimulated." The day of the high-impact narrative that gets people thinking and talking—and maybe even changes the world—is done.

Slow down a minute, writes Scherer, an assistant editor at Columbia Journalism Review. Lengthy, elaborate pieces are flourishing. Even Maxim, the successful sex ‘n’ sports "lad mag" whose editor sneers at such behemoths, regularly runs 4,000- to 5,000-word pieces.

The conventional wisdom has it that serious magazine journalism is a victim of time-pressured readers, especially young readers who have their eyes glued to the TV. That’s not all wrong. Surveys show, for example, that younger readers spend about 29 minutes reading each issue of The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, down from 43 a dozen years ago. Yet researchers at the University of Maryland report that Americans actually have more free time than ever before, and that younger folk—single, childless, and often still in school—have tons of leisure time. Reading remains as popular as ever. And while magazine sales have been flat for 10 years, the number of magazines has jumped 40 percent.

Therein lies a clue to what really ails the long magazine article, Scherer believes: People have far more choices than ever before, not only in magazines but in all media. In some ways, this has fostered illusions about the decline of serious writing. Long articles often do look shorter and sweeter now, but often only because they’ve been fitted with pullquotes, graphs, and other "access points" by editors desperate to claim readers’ attention. New niche-market magazines such as the shopping-obsessed, paragraph-phobic Lucky have been born, but there’s no evidence that they’ve stolen readers from what former New Yorker editor Tina Brown once quaintly called "text-based" magazines.

Shapiro, an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University, doesn’t think long articles are a dead form, either. They’re just not much fun to read, he says. Most now follow the same rubric: "anecdote; set-up graph; scene, digression, scene, quote from Harvard sociologist"—leading to "a numbing predictability."

Of course, magazine journalism has come a long way since the 1950s. The New Journalism, that gritty, involved, first-person form popularized in the 1960s by Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion, was every English composition teacher’s dream: New Journalism showed and did not tell, and varied in form while making a point. But along the way, style dethroned the story, Shapiro claims. As Wolfe wrote in 1973, "The proof of one’s technical mastery as a writer becomes paramount and the demonstration of moral points becomes secondary."

A great magazine story can still make people take notice. A recent example: William Langewiesche’s 70,000-word serialized report on the recovery of the World Trade Center site in The Atlantic Monthly. The biggest threat to the long-form article, Scherer suggests, isn’t pea-brained readers, but editors who believe their own condescending blather about what readers want.