Aug 12, 2011 5 min read

Conventional wisdom tells us newspapers are dying.

Of course, newspapers are not alone. Magazines are shriveling, too. The movie industry? It sells 75 percent fewer tickets today than its peak in 1946. Ask someone born before 1950 about radio; it’s a shell of its former self. Broadcast television is ceding ground rapidly to cable and will never regain its top spot. As we stand today, the Internet remains the only mass medium with growth in its future.

That’s because, in the life cycle of mass media, decline is inevitable. Without drifting too far into my other role as part-time professor of communication at Waynesburg University, every medium begins with innovation, followed by market penetration as it becomes widely adopted. If it’s lucky, the medium reaches peak status, where it is the most popular medium in terms of audience and revenue. After that? It’s all downhill.

It makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Each medium grows until something new or better comes along. After that, the medium is left to try to adapt and eke out a new role. We call it the adaption phase: they’re diminished, they’re different, but they still exist.

Radio might be the best example of this. It began its life as the primary source of entertainment in American homes. That is until broadcast television came along. Realizing it would never hold off the television, radio left behind the soap operas and comedy hours in favor of music formats and disc jockeys. Beyond switching content, the radio survived as a medium because the focus came to be on portability, that a radio could go where a television could not. In other words, radio ceded the living room for the car. But it didn’t die. Sure, it will never again be the primary form of entertainment for American households, but that doesn’t mean it it will cease to exist in the near future. The industry is just different now, adapted to a new role.

So we return again to newspapers. The industry seems to draw more Chicken Little concern than the others. Much ink has been spilled and tears shed over how and if the newspaper industry will adapt — and just what the new role will look like. Unlike previous new media challengers that had their own unique advantages without print’s depth and scope, the Internet does everything that newspapers do well — and more.

Or does it?

The American newspaper has always been the one to do the journalistic heavy lifting. Television and the Internet get more attention and revenue, but the newspaper is the driving force behind most of the journalism in this country. The Web, like radio and television before it, simply takes all the hard work that newspapers produce and passes it off as its own.

The prevailing wisdom of the Web has always been one of short attention spans, of summaries and synopsis, pull quotes and highlights. The Internet has proven adept as a channel for chopping up and disseminating newspaper journalism (see: Huffington Post, Drudge Report, et al.). But there’s been a push online lately, a backlash of sorts, against the instant gratification of short and sweet on the Internet.

A new trend forgoes the tweets, bullets and blog posts for the exact opposite: the lengthy reads of magazines’ and newspapers’ heyday. Long-form journalism (or longreads in trendy hipster Web parlance) is the kind of lengthy narrative works that delve deep into subjects rather than skimming their surface for SEO keywords. And despite the precipice that newspapers supposedly sit on, this type of journalism is far from dead. In fact, long-form’s revival is proving that newspapers might benefit from, rather than succumb to, our digital frontier.

This week saw two spectacular examples of this: One, a thousands-word long narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in the “New Yorker,” and the other, a five-part series on the heart-wrenching work of a combat hospital on the front lines in Afghanistan. Both works represent the best in journalism, the antidote to the obsessions of junk journalism (see: Anthony, Casey; Sheen, Charlie) that give the whole Fourth Estate a bad name.

This is the kind of quality journalism newspapers and magazines have always produced, but the Internet has spread it to further corners than traditional newsprint ever could.

Thanks to Web aggregators, social media sharing on Facebook and Twitter and services like Instapaper and Read it Later allowing you to easily send longer articles to mobile devices, these types of long pieces have reached more eyeballs than they ever could have had they remained in the pages of the magazine or newspaper.

So perhaps the newspaper life cycle hasn’t been written yet; maybe the future of the newspaper will be saved by the very medium that’s supposedly killing it.

If you’d like to tap into this treasure trove of great writing, visit longform.org or longreads.com. Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com. You can thank him later.