I can demolish a 600-page fantasy novel in five days. Dragons, court intrigue, enemies-to-lovers subplots — hand me that book on a Monday and I'll finish it before Friday, eyes burning at 2 a.m., unable to stop turning pages. I read the entire “Fourth Wing” series in two weeks. I devoured “Beach Read” and everything else Emily Henry has ever written so fast that I had to reread passages to make sure I didn't miss anything.

But I cannot finish a 3,000-word investigative piece.

Not even when it's about true crime. Not even when it's about something that happened at my university. Not even when it's the kind of story I theoretically care about. Last month, I opened an article about a serial killer — 9,000 words, meticulously reported, published in a reputable publication. I read the first two paragraphs. A notification pinged. I checked my phone. I opened another tab. I closed the article. Three days later, I still haven't returned to it.

But I can listen to a podcast about the same topic for an hour straight.

This contradiction has haunted me, especially since I decided to spend my senior capstone defending the thing I can't seem to read: longform journalism.

I'm 22. I'm a journalism student who doesn't read journalism. The math doesn't work. Or maybe it does — and that's precisely the problem.

The Crisis Everyone Gets Wrong

The standard narrative is familiar: Gen Z has the attention span of a goldfish. TikTok destroyed our brains. They want bite-sized content, quick dopamine hits, shallow engagement. They can't focus on anything longer than a tweet. Longform journalism is dying because readers like me are broken.

Except I'm not broken. I'm not short on attention. I'm short on something else: a reason to care.

That's the distinction nobody makes. And I think it matters.

When I started this capstone in August, I was supposed to investigate why longform journalism is struggling in the digital age. I gathered the standard hypotheses — algorithm-driven feeds, mobile-first reading, the rise of short-form video, the economic collapse of newsrooms. But mostly, I wanted to understand why I felt like a traitor: a journalism student who loved reading but couldn't force herself to read journalism.

So I did what journalism students do. I interviewed the masters. Skip Hollandsworth has been at Texas Monthly for 36 years, writing crime stories that have become movies. Jerry Mitchell leads the investigative team at Mississippi Today, known for his work on civil rights cold cases. Ross McCammon is the editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly, who spent two decades at the most prestigious magazines in New York. Mark Horvit, a current professor of journalism at the University of Missouri and previous executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors. Roxanna Asgarian is a freelance investigative journalist who writes about the criminal justice system and child welfare.

I expected them to tell me that longform was dying. Instead, they told me something far more interesting: longform isn't dying. It’s loved by many, but it's also being strangled. And the difference matters.

The Structure: What Jerry Knows About Tension

Jerry Mitchell became obsessed with stories as a grad student at Ohio State. In a literary journalism class, he discovered writers like Joan Didion and Eric Larson. He learned about something called "the uninterrupted dream" — John Gardner's concept of keeping readers so entranced in a narrative that they don't notice the real world around them.

"You want to keep people connected into that narrative," Mitchell told me. "It's like a movie playing out in their heads."

This is exactly how I feel when I'm reading those 600-page novels. I'm inside someone else's consciousness, living in their story so completely that reality fades. Time dissolves. My phone could blow up and I wouldn't notice until chapter's end.

Mitchell is most known for his novel “Race Against Time”, a detailed recollection of his efforts to reopen civil rights cases. His work significantly contributed to bringing justice to notorious murders, such as the assassination of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing. There’s even a movie titled “Ghosts of Mississippi” starring Alec Baldwin, James Woods and Whoopi Goldberg about the Evers case. Mitchell is played by Jerry Levine, director of TV shows like “Hawaii Five-0” and “Elementary”.

Mitchell discovered the power of this when he started writing serialized narratives — stories broken into chapters that ran for days. For one series called The Preacher and the Klansman, the Clarion-Ledger, a newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, carved out space on the editorial page for 13 consecutive days. Each section was more than 1,000 words. Each day, the story continued.

For another series Mitchell wrote, a woman subscriber of the Clarion-Ledger, later told Mitchell she woke up at 5:30 a.m. waiting for the paper to hit her driveway so she could find out if Mitchell had a genetic disease running in his family. She wasn't forced to care about Jerry's family medical history. The story made her care so much that she rearranged her morning around discovering what happened next.

That's the power of structure.

But here's what Mitchell also noticed: structure doesn't work if you interrupt it. He worries about all the multimedia embedded in digital stories — the videos that pop up, the ads that slide in, the related articles that tempt you away. Gardner's "uninterrupted dream" requires exactly that: no interruption.

"I always worry," Mitchell said, "that you're gonna go down this rabbit hole. Oh, there's a YouTube video. Let me click on this. And the next thing you know, you've been there two hours."

Mitchell ends each chapter on tension, not resolution. He ends on a note that pulls you forward. Mitchell wrote about James Meredith a narrative titled “The Last Days of Ben Chester White”. Meredith is a civil rights activist who was shot on June 6, 1966 during his march through Mississippi. In Mitchell’s article, he embedded the AP's initial mistaken report that Meredith had died. Readers wouldn't know until later that he'd survived. Mitchell left them hanging, desperate to keep reading, needing to know what happened.

"It's almost like a musical scale," he said. "You don't end on a finishing note. You end in a way that creates tension or drama or a setback. So people are going like, 'Wait a minute. I've got to keep reading.'"

That's a technique that predates the internet by centuries. But journalism has mostly abandoned it in favor of the inverted pyramid — put the most important information first, then trail off into less important details that readers will never reach.

I've read both structures. The inverted pyramid puts me to sleep. The narrative arc that ends in tension makes me physically unable to stop.

The Foundation: What Mark Teaches About Endurance

Mark Horvit has spent decades in the field — first as an investigative reporter and editor for major Texas newspapers, then as executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, and now as a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. If anyone knows how longform has changed — and how it hasn’t — it’s Horvit.

When I asked Horvit what defines longform journalism today, his response surprised me: “I wouldn’t define it any differently than when I started. It’s a story you’ve taken time to report, that takes time for the audience to consume.” For Horvit, the essence of longform is the depth — both of the reporting and the engagement it asks of readers or listeners. “What’s changed is everything around the story: the platforms, the tools, the technology. But the core? That’s still craft.”

He’s quick to push back against nostalgia for a time when “everyone read 3,000-word stories.” In reality, Horvit said, most readers have always bailed partway through. “People say attention spans are short now. That’s probably true, but it’s always been true. The longform stuff was always for a portion of the audience who wanted it — often a small minority. And that’s okay, as long as it’s the group that needs or values it.”​

At Missouri, Horvit teaches investigative journalism “in a totally platform-agnostic way.” His students turn in text, video, podcast, or interactive projects — sometimes all at once. “Reporting is reporting, and the skills haven’t changed. How you present it — well, that’s constantly changing. You can’t just spew facts for column after column and expect people to stick. It’s on us to use whatever platforms help the story find an audience: photos, video, audio, graphics, even VR if it fits.”

The heart of his teaching for young journalists? “Get good at the basics: find the information, conduct interviews that get answers, organize your thoughts, and communicate what you found. You can’t tell a great longform story if you can’t tell a good short one. The rest is practice, curiosity, and realizing that the storytelling devices that make fiction irresistible — character, scene, color — are what you need to bring to journalism, too.”

As Horvit summed it up: “The way you tell your stories has changed, but the skills you need are the same. You just have to think more creatively about the way you package it and the way you provide it.”

The Question That Matters

Here's what I realized over the course of this semester: my generation doesn't have an attention problem. We have a caring problem. And the journalism industry created that problem by choosing speed over depth, clicks over craft, information over emotion.

I can sit for six hours reading about fictional characters. I can binge an entire podcast series in two days. I can watch a YouTube video on an obscure topic I didn't know existed an hour earlier. My attention isn't broken. It's just that most journalism isn't making the choice worth my while.

But when journalism does do the work — when it creates characters instead of sources, when it structures narrative tension instead of information density, when it embeds specificity instead of abstractions — I read it like I read novels. I read it twice. I call the writer to ask how they did it.

The real crisis in longform journalism isn't that readers can't focus. It's that publishers stopped demanding that writers make us focus. It's that somewhere along the way, the industry decided that being informative was enough. That the public would read important news out of obligation. That we as journalists didn't need to earn attention — we could just demand it.

Hollandsworth told me something that's stuck with me. He was talking about how he rewrites his own work now, cutting sentences he once thought were clever. "Why is that?" I asked.

"Because I get bored with my own stories," Hollandsworth said.

He gets bored. After 36 years at Texas Monthly. After hundreds of published stories. If he doesn't believe every sentence deserves to be there, why should we as journalists expect readers to?

The answer is: we shouldn't. We shouldn't expect anything. We should earn it.