Sound bites

Long-form journalism; probing articles of context, insight, breadth, and complexity are finding it harder to make their way into remaining newspapers; even newspapers of record. An article in the Columbia Journalism Review takes issue with the precipitous fall-off of long-form articles in the Wall Street Journal; especially under the leadership of Rupert Murdoch (the graph below illustrates the number of page-one articles of at least 2500 words).

The demise of nuanced long-form journalism trickles down to shape the capacity of readers to engage the inherent complexity of many issues, thus eroding tolerance, intellectual rigor, and a whole range of collateral reasoning that might otherwise be analyzed, discussed, and explored further... sounds like the challenges we often address in our classroom.
There is more at stake then leaving more page-space for advertising.
 
Thanks for the tip on this article, Jim.