The New New Journalism Platforms

An excellent article by David L. Ulin Los Angeles Times Book Critic detailing the new digital platforms for narrative journalism:

When National Book Award-winning novelist William T. Vollmann went to Japan this spring to report on the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant from inside the contamination zone, he did what any journalist would do. He bought a dosimeter to chart the radiation. He took “Cold War-era iodide tablets,” which made his tongue tingle and left him with a rash. He decided to ignore statistics or official statements in favor of his observations, his conversations with survivors, his impressions: a kind of overview. “The stunning capacity of the Japanese official to say absolutely nothing,” he writes, “is matched only by the absurd degree of trust that his public places in him.”

This is what literary journalists have always done, look for the story behind the story and find a narrative of their own. Think of Norman Mailer, writing about the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, or Joan Didion in Haight-Ashbury, or Denis Johnson, reporting from a 1990s Rainbow Gathering, that kinder, gentler Burning Man where he discovers that not only is he part of “a Peter Pan generation nannied by matronly Wendys like Bill and Hillary Clinton,” but that he is as complicit in this as anyone. It’s journalism as personal revelation, journalism as exploration, which is also what Vollmann has in mind.

And yet, there’s a difference — for when his piece on Fukushima, “Into the Forbidden Zone,” came out last week, it did not appear in a magazine, as had those earlier efforts, or even in print at all. Rather, “Into the Forbidden Zone” is the second release from the San Francisco-based Byliner, a digital publisher of narrative journalism, which made a splash last month when it debuted with Jon Krakauer’s “Three Cups of Deceit,” an extended inquiry into Greg Mortenson’s bestselling “Three Cups of Tea.” Krakauer’s investigation ended up on “60 Minutes” and became an instant digital sensation, spurring a national conversation about Mortenson and his work. In the process, it may also have helped legitimize a new distribution model for literary journalism, a form that, over the last several years, has been widely considered to be at risk.

This sense of risk, of course, is a reaction — to loss of revenue and shrinking space in print. Literary journalism requires resources, and according to “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism,” a report issued this week by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, “Journalists must be prepared for continued pressure on editorial costs.”

For Byliner, however, as well as other digital platforms such as the Atavist and Virginia Quarterly Review’s Assignment Afghanistan, the flip side of risk is opportunity. “I wasn’t quite as Chicken Little-ish as some others,” says John Tayman, Byliner’s co-founder and chief executive, and a former editor and writer for Outside, Men’s Journal and Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine. “I knew readers hadn’t gone away.

Here is the FULL L.A. TIMES article.