Longform Meltdown

Dean Starkman takes the temperature of longform at a few papers. It's not looking good.

The Los Angeles Times, for instance, published 256 stories longer than 2,000 words last year, compared to 1,776 in 2003—a drop of 86 percent, according to searches of the Factiva database. The Washington Post published 1,378 stories over 2,000 words last year, about half as many as 2003 when it published 2,755. The Wall Street Journal, which pioneered the longform narrative in American newspapers, published 35 percent fewer stories over 2,000 words last year from a decade ago, 468 from 721.

When it comes to stories longer than 3,000 words, the three papers showed even sharper declines. The WSJ's total is…