A forgotten classic and the future of journalism

The Reporter Who Time Forgot
How Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day changed journalism


Meanwhile, The Longest Day was reissued in 1994 for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. It still sells—a fact that belies the glaring omission of Ryan’s work from so many anthologies of literary journalism, and also offers a powerful lesson for a trade trying to figure out what people will pay to read. There is nothing, it turns out, like a densely reported story propelled by the palpable sense of a reporter chasing his story.

It makes for interesting reading in light of print's economic woes.

For one thing, i wonder if a big part of Newsweek's problems stem from a "cool kids" syndrome. Back in 1989, Newsweek tried to reinvent itself by emulating Spy magazine (which itself went under in 1998) Last year, its preferred role model was The Economist. Were these the best models for Newsweek given its current and potential readership? Or did they reflect a desire by the staff to improve their street cred within the guild?

A comment at the CJR suggests the latter.

Some very astute points. Narcissism, to some degree . . . NEWSWEEK was not alone in wanting to tell us what its writers were interested in, but the tone belied the title of the publication. After the 1960s a lot of magazines went after a demographic that didn't get much of its news from, you know, 'reading', while stiffing the demographic that did. So you had younger, pop-culture drenched writers trying to tell older, more conservative news consumers a lot of stuff that the latter knew to be rubbish, and calling it 'news'. I still don't think the inbred NY/DC media-political echo chamber gets itself .

As the article on The Longest Day notes, Ryan got his backing from "the least hip of all magazines, Reader’s Digest."

So the unhip magazine helps create "new journalism" and produces a work that sold at tens of millions of copies (and still sells to this day.) Yet that model of journalism languishes.