Clive Thompson on How Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis:
When something newsworthy happens today — Brett Favre losing to the Jets, news of a new iPhone, a Brazilian election runoff — you get a sudden blizzard of status updates. These are just short takes, and they’re often half-baked or gossipy and may not even be entirely true. But that’s OK; they’re not intended to be carefully constructed. Society is just chewing over what happened, forming a quick impression of What It All Means.
The long take is the opposite: It’s a deeply considered report and analysis, and it often takes weeks, months, or years to produce. It used to be that only traditional media, like magazines or documentaries or books, delivered the long take. But now, some of the most in-depth stuff I read comes from academics or businesspeople penning big blog essays, Dexter fans writing 5,000-word exegeses of the show, and nonprofits like the Pew Charitable Trusts producing exhaustively researched reports on American life.
The long take also thrives on the long tail. Whereas a tweet becomes dated within minutes, a really smart long take holds value for years. Back in the ’90s, my magazine articles vanished after the issue left the newsstand. But now that the pieces are online, readers email me every week saying they’ve stumbled upon something years old.
The real loser here is the middle take. This is what the weeklies like Timeand Newsweek have historically offered: reportage and essays produced a few days after major events, with a bit of analysis sprinkled on top. They’re neither fast enough to be conversational nor slow enough to be truly deep. The Internet has essentially demonstrated how unsatisfying that sort of thinking can be.
This trend has already changed blogging. Ten years ago, my favorite bloggers wrote middle takes — a link with a couple of sentences of commentary — and they’d update a few times a day. Once Twitter arrived, they began blogging less often but with much longer, more-in-depth essays.
