SoJ Web Report | May 13, 2010
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The story began with a haunting image:
A little girl’s face appearing in the broken window of a house outside Tampa, Fla.
Neighbors saw the face and were startled, because they had lived next door to the house for years and had no idea a young child lived inside. Police officers and child abuse investigators soon showed up and discovered a nightmarish case. Inside a small, darkened room swarming with roaches, they found an emaciated 6-year-old girl covered in sores and naked except for a swollen diaper. Her matted hair swarmed with lice. She could not speak and could barely walk. When a detective asked the feral child her name, she did not appear to hear his voice.
“Radio ahead to Tampa General,” the detective told his partner. “If this child doesn’t get to a hospital, she’s not going to make it.”
That scene was the opening to "The Girl in the Window," an unforgettable narrative reported and written by my friend and colleague Lane DeGregory and published in the St. Petersburg Times in July 2008. The 6,500-word piece, sprawled across six full pages of the paper, followed the child’s rescue and her adoption by another family and chronicled the worst and the best of human behavior. A story about the redemptive power of love in the wake of unimaginable neglect, it ultimately won Lane a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.
Perhaps even more impressive was the emotional connection it triggered in readers who devoured the story both in print and online. The Web version of the project, which included not just the story but video interviews and vivid photos by staff photographer Melissa Lyttle, went viral and became one of the best-read pieces in the history of the Times Web site. To date it has received close to a million page views.
The flood of response to The Girl in the Window defies the conventional wisdom that readers detest long stories, especially online. For decades, readership surveys have repeatedly reinforced the same gloomy message, insisting no one has time or interest in any article that can’t be absorbed within a few minutes. In recent years, as news holes have shrunk and newspapers have struggled to stay afloat, that message has been embraced with even greater certainty by newsrooms across the country. In-depth articles, seen as a luxury, are disappearing. At many newspapers, long-form narratives have become an endangered species.
Joel Achenbach, a gifted Washington Post reporter, recently explored the future of storytelling in the age of Twitter and Facebook. In a provocative Post article titled “The vestigial tale,” he interviewed everyone from novelist Jonathan Franzen to New Yorker editor David Remnick and asked them fundamental questions about why stories matter and how they can endure in “a click-and-skim world.” It was clear, Achenbach concluded, that journalists and novelists will have to become more disciplined to engage readers in “a society of scanners,” where aggregation seems to be edging out “content creation.”
“This is not a crisis, this is progress,” he wrote. “Fewer ‘jello ledes,’ quote-dumps, the whole notebook disgorged upon the page. Less overwriting by frustrated novelists. Sorry, we don’t need to read Proust’s version of the zoning hearing.”
“There’s endless talk in the news media about the next killer app,” Achenbach wrote. “Maybe Twitter really will change the world. Maybe the next big thing will be just an algorithm, like Google’s citation-ranking equation.” But Smith is betting there will still be a market, somehow, for what he does. Narrative isn’t merely a technique for communicating; it’s how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this.
“They know that the story is the original killer app.”
Gary Smith, the brilliant Sports Illustrated writer whose lengthy profiles are beloved by legions of readers, predicted the well-crafted story would never die.
The phenomenal reader response to Lane DeGregory’s The Girl in the Window reminds us that long stories are not the problem. What audiences truly hate — what makes them turn the page — are poorly conceived and yawn-inducing stories of any length.
If we give readers something worth their time, they are eager to read and read and read.
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Questions? Comments? Email the Web editor.
