The Loneliness of the Long-Form Feature Writer
A new book charts the demise of the printed press. But there is hope for former journalists.
Where does a newspaper journalist turn when they’re made redundant? What if they’re a feature writer? Where is the demand for carefully crafted, long-form content?
The questions unfold as Roger Lytollis, a former member of the features team I managed for a time, charts the familiar demise of the printed press in his autobiographical new book, Panic As Man Burns Crumpets: The Vanishing World of the Local Journalist.
It has deservedly earned glowing reviews in The Guardian and The i, as well as gushing sleeve notes from giants of Roger’s native Cumbrian literary scene, Melvyn Bragg and Stuart Maconie.
As a friend and writer, who trudged through the mud and danced the delights of many of his anecdotes, I thought I owed it to Roger to write a meaningful review of his book. One which offers a little hope to feature writers like Roger — and other journalists who distrust all things digital.
The reason I write it on this platform is twofold:
- Medium articles are read by, and written by, many journalists, writers and authors from all over the world. This might just bring him a few more sales.
- Medium is also proof that feature writers like Roger DO have a future, and that they need to embrace the digital age — because Google is the long-form writer’s friend. More on that soon…
The Vanishing World of the Local Journalist
So to the book. There are essentially two elements to it — anecdotes and big picture stuff.
Many of the stories Roger tells are familiar to me, but anyone who is not aware of newsroom antics would find much of it incredible.
In the sense that the non-journalist will wonder how we ever got the newspapers out on the streets in the first place. So many pieces of the jigsaw had to fit together in a short time frame, and things often went wrong. “With hilarious consequences,” the movie blurb would say.
I won’t give any spoilers, only to say there are many moments of hilarity, a cast of larger than life characters, a catalogue of mainly poor decisions by various editors and owners, and a longing for the days when the job was so much fun, and filled with immense satsfaction and pride.
Because eventually the job of newspaper journalist lost its lustre, its glamour, its sense of purpose and achievement. As newspaper sales fell, so the axe of human resources chopped talented staff and pulled the roots out from traditional journalism. What would follow was a shallow substitute.
For Roger Lytollis, the slide was particularly uncomfortable. Incidentally, The Guardian made an error in their review, saying “This book is not really about him.”
The book is totally about Roger.
He was a dedicated feature writer. He did not serve an apprenticeship as a news reporter as most journalists do, he was never ‘toughened up’ by being forced to go on death knocks, which required us to visit the home of someone recently deceased.
He was painfully shy — a quality you might expect to hold back a successful journalist. Roger also bravely admits to having a history of depression.
But he fought all this valiantly. Silently, but valiantly.
I would send him out to interview a person of interest, and he would leave the building without a sound. Then return a couple of hours later to craft a masterpiece which made me feel like I was sat in the same room as the person he’d just spoken to.
Roger, like all the best feature writers, could connect with his subject, whoever they were, from whatever walk of life. He brought them alive on the page, he allowed them to tell their own incredible stories. Sometimes joyous. Sometimes heartbreaking.
He brought us the stories behind the names in the news pages. There was always so much more to tell than the cold, black and white world of news allowed. That’s why I loved features, and that’s why I had no hesitation giving any job to Roger.
He could tell stories with style and substance. And his book is testament to that.
I’ve headlined this article as a play on the bleak 1960s book and film The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Roger, like myself actually, has ran a fair few half marathons in his time.
Having the ability to look far ahead and plot your way, steadily but ever more successfully, to a satisfactory conclusion. That’s the feature writer. Sprinting to the finish without a glance sideways as to what else is influencing the scene, that’s the news reporter.
The Big Fish Eats The Little Fish
Then there’s the big picture stuff. A chance for Roger to put the boot in because he was too shy to speak up at the time. And because he knew nobody in management would listen.
Roger expertly recalls a chronological tale of the sad demise of the family-owned Cumbrian Newspapers business.
Eventually, CN sold out to publishing giant Newsquest, in turn acquired by American behemoth Gannett. Predictably, the vast majority of the workforce was thrown on the scrapheap. Roger lasted longer than most but was finally dumped the same way.
Not even all his awards and many more nominations (a sore point) made him indispensable. Which I think Roger found hard to come to terms with initially.
But such has become the world of newspapers. It’s a story told across the UK, indeed across the world.
Once upon a time, newspapers were staffed by many talented journalists, who provided a valuable service to the public. Then the internet was invented, and it all turned to shit.
I sense Roger’s joy in using swear words in his book, after a lifetime of being forced to write for a ‘family audience’. Some editors we worked under were so cautious I’m surprised they got out of their beds in the morning.
Roger’s take on the role the internet and social media played in killing the printed product does not surprise me. He speaks fondly of ’old school’ journalists and he inherited their distrust of anything written on a screen, rather than on a piece of paper.
So do I share the romantic longing for newspapers to return to former glories, to be able to watch the presses roll at night and smell the ink that will inform the public the morning after?
No, I’m afraid not.
I’ve always embraced progress and recognised that the world moves on. Those who fare best are those who adapt.
The newspaper industry did not adapt. And newspapers were never going to survive anyway. Deriding the mistake of giving away content for free is a sideshow.
Digital platforms brought immediacy; the ability to share the very latest news. Newspapers were limited to printing the news as it was at deadline, which in many cases was half a day before people would read about it.
Digital brought the ability to constantly update a story. Newspapers would have to wait until the day after. Or the week after.
Newspapers could report on a terrifying plane crash, as my own newspaper did when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up by terrorists in 1988 and landed on the town of Lockerbie. The standard of journalism that night was exceptional.
But digital can bring accompanying, eyewitness videos of shocking events, and interviews gushing with raw emotion.
Newspapers can describe a football match, digital can bring live action updates.
And I’m talking newspapers in their heyday. Now, it’s a miracle any paper gets out at all with so few staff running them. Nobody has time to check the stories after they’re written, so they are printed with mistake after embarrassing mistake.
I could see it all going this way, so I wanted out, and created my own exit by twice asking for redundancy — the second time it was granted.
I kept quiet about that because all around me, others were also being made jobless and it was the last thing colleagues of mine wanted. They were lost without the safety and comforts of the working environment they’d been nurtured in.
Roger was the same. The axe finally fell and he was left in limbo.
So Where Does a Newspaper Feature Writer Go When the Newspaper Industry Collapses?
Apart from writing a book about this demise, the obvious answer is to go freelance and submit features to larger publications and magazines. But these, too, have been slashing budgets. It is rare to make much money these days via this once reliable source.
And so we come to digital. And we hit a problem with a lot of journalists.
Whereas I was in journalism to inform, educate and entertain, on whichever platform and by whatever method, I found it astounding how many people were in the game because of a love of print, a love of reading, a love of books, a love of libraries, a love of spending Sunday mornings working their way through nine supplements of a 156-page newspaper.
There was an unhealthy distrust of all things digital. I remember vividly sitting in one conference of department heads and a very senior member quipped: “I think people are going to get fed up of looking at mobile phone screens and want to go back to paper.”
Mouth wide open, I was going to poke fun at the comment until the rest of the room murmured in agreement. I knew then that we were screwed.
The chief job of a media organisation is to communicate with the end user — the reader, the viewer or the listener. If you can’t think on their level and act on their level, you are never going to see eye to eye with them.
Which is why newspapers rapidly developed a core readership of 60-plus habit buyers. But there weren’t enough of these people to help pay the journalists’ wages.
So where does a feature writer go now? If long-form writing is your speciality, who wants you?
Here again, we have a problem with many journalists. They can’t see beyond their traditional circulation boundaries. So indoctrinated are they in writing for the local community — and not a centimetre (or should I say half an inch) outside, that they are blinkered to opportunities further afield.
Now this is a real bugbear of mine and I’ll try not to whine on too much about it, but I was glad when Roger admitted in his book that ‘community’ was no great driver of his own ambition.
Another vivid memory of mine was a management conference on how to leverage the power of the internet. I was excited about this and proposed that we could start reporting on the more advertising-lucrative patch of our region, where we did not have a paper at the time. We wouldn’t have the overheads of launching a new title — we could do it all online.
They way people looked at me, you’d have thought I had landed from another planet. With smelly feet. This was a small-thinking newspaper group. It forever followed the example of larger media organisations. And they were all going hyperlocal.
Yes, hyperlocal — jumping on a platform which was literally called the World Wide Web, and using it to niche down into reporting on individual streets.
I loathe hyperlocal with a passion. A number of newspapers survive small scale on this inward-looking model, and hundreds of email newsletters and Facebook pages have been launched as a digital version of standing at your garden fence, gossiping with the neighbour.
Hyperlocal emphasises the great failing of the newspaper industry. It looks within, instead of out. It’s exclusive, rather than inclusive. It’s narrow-minded, and small minded. It is Brexit, it is racism.
That may seem harsh, but let me explain. Hyperlocal is a mindset, to look after your own. To cater for people just like you, in your area, and nobody else. I just find that damaging. My community is the entire planet.
More than ever — look at Covid, look at the climate crisis — the world needs to be working as one. But hyperlocal encourages people to look the other way.
And talking of the climate crisis, the sooner newspapers die and stop using so many trees and so much water, the better for all of us.
Journalism is a different thing. The world needs quality journalism. And it needs to find a way to make it pay on digital platforms.
Feature writing, long-form writing, does not have a home in newspapers any longer. Roger knows that all too painfully, after one editor we had destroyed the ground from underneath us by replacing long-form content with the same hyperlocal garbage that should have been in the lower reaches of the news pages.
So where does the feature writer go now?
I hope to see Roger set up here on Medium, on Vocal, on other similar platforms, on his own blog even, and share his expertly crafted words with the whole world.
There is an appreciative audience of millions here on Medium. And yes, it does require a bit of modern knowledge to share content and write the headlines that people are looking for, but old dogs can learn new tricks. I educate myself with new skills every day — even if it’s just watching a YouTube video while I make the kids their meal!
You can make money as a writer on Medium, too, through the Partner Program. Some people make a single figure sum per month, others make five figures. Some make four or five figures for just one article.
There are pointers former journalists need to know about succeeding on Medium, and I’ve written about that here already:
Long Form Ranks Highest
One important thing to note for luddite journalists is that Google is most certainly your friend. The algorithm to reach the front page of searches is largely dictated by the quality of the article, its originality, usefulness and its length — articles longer than 1,500 words perform better.
So when you write on Medium, which has an incredibly high domain authority of 95/100, the chances of quality content ranking highly on Google are very strong indeed.
Forget the clickbait that became a bane of your hits-chasing existence on newspaper websites — this kind of thing is not rewarded by search engines.
The digital world holds more opportunities for the journalist and feature writer than print ever could have afforded.
Just get over your obsession with print, embrace a new partner and begin reconnecting with people.
The world needs more writers like Roger.
Panic As Man Burns Crumpets: The Vanishing World of the Local Journalist is published by Little, Brown (£16.99). Buy it here or via any number of online booksellers. Or be old school, walk into a book store and hand over some cash.
