Web surfing or crawl watching is not reading

Art Cooper’s recent announcement that he would retire June 1 as editor of GQ triggers anew questions about the future of serious, long-form journalism in an era increasingly dominated by magazines more interested in the sensational and the superficial than the substantive.

GQ is no New Yorker, and Cooper is no William Shawn -- or David Remnick, for that matter -- but Cooper did transform what was once a smallish, vaguely gay magazine with no literary heft into a serious mainstream magazine that publishes first-rate journalism.

In recent years, though, GQ has been getting stiff newsstand competition from the much racier Maxim and FHM (For Him Magazine), and in response, Cooper made GQ a bit racier at times and reduced the length of many stories.

The early betting is that Cooper’s successor will come from a magazine more salacious or more service-oriented than Cooper would prefer -- especially since there are widespread reports in New York publishing circles that, after months of rumors about Cooper’s future, his departure was not really voluntary.

Cooper denies that, and he rightly dismisses as “nonsense” any suggestion that he is “the last bastion of literary journalism in America.” But he has certainly been a supporter of that brand of journalism.

When Cooper was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in January, he said the honor was a “tribute to the millions of fearless magazine readers for whom an article longer than 500 words is not regarded as an impending colonoscopy.”

Not every story has to be long to be good, of course. In cyberspace, writers have no limits, and one often longs for an editor -- any editor.

But I do worry that Cooper’s “fearless readers” -- and the magazine editors who care about them -- are a vanishing breed.

The laddie formula

Early last summer, Rolling Stone plucked its new editor, Ed Needham, from FHM, one of a growing number of London-based “laddie” magazines that cater to young males not overly burdened with intellectual aspirations or a social conscience. The laddie formula of celebrity photos, scantily clad women and flashy graphics stands in stark (and depressing) contrast to Rolling Stone, the launching pad for Hunter Thompson and scores of lesser-known practitioners of what the New York Times called “epic narratives and literary journalism.”

But what concerns me more than the fate of either GQ or Rolling Stone is the far broader implication for today’s young people and our entire society in what Jann Wenner, the founder-owner of Rolling Stone, said in trying to justify his new hire.

“Back when Rolling Stone was publishing those 7,000-word stories, there was no CNN, no Internet,” Wenner said. “Now you can travel instantaneously around the globe, and you don’t need these long stories to get up to speed.”

Huh?

CNN and the Internet provide short, quick news flashes. There is nothing either epic or literary about anything they do. And what does instantaneous global travel have to do with getting up to speed? It seems to me that the faster we can move and the farther we can travel, the more we need to understand where we’re going -- and why. We need stories that provide context, perspective, nuance and subtlety, stories that don’t just tell what happened 10 seconds ago but why it happened and how it happened and what it means and what might happen next -- next week and next month and next year.

Instead, television sound bites are getting shorter and shorter, more newspapers are publishing “news roundups” instead of real stories, and magazines increasingly want not only shorter stories but also bigger pictures -- and the more sex and celebrity the better.

It’s true that in the continuing aftermath of Sept. 11, newsstand sales for the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s and several other serious publications have increased significantly. But that may be only temporary.

“Most magazines now resemble movie posters more closely than they do the dry pages of a book,” Michael Scherer wrote in a recent issue of Columbia Journalism Review.

That didn’t seem to bother Needham. “Television, movies, the Internet -- they’re all visual mediums, and I don’t think people have time to sit down and read,” he says.

People don’t have time to read? If he’s right, all of us -- and our children and our society -- will be poorer for it. Indeed, we already are. According to the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., Americans ages 16 to 35 rank 14th among 17 industrialized nations in literacy.

I understand the appeal of pictures. They’re dramatic, immediate, visceral. I watch television, surf the Web, go to the movies. But there are few activities I find more pleasurable or more rewarding than reading a good story or a good book -- not a few words scrolling across the bottom of the CNN screen or a bulletin flashing on my computer monitor but an honest-to-Gutenberg piece of thoughtful, literate prose.

Beyond quick fixes

We live in complex and dangerous times. CNN and AOL may give us the first word on the latest complexity and the newest danger. But only a well-researched, well-written, well-edited story can explain all the ramifications of the problems we face.

Those problems figure to get worse -- maybe a lot worse -- before they get better. That means the next generation will have to solve them. I don’t think they’ll be able to do that if they don’t develop an appetite for the kind of prose that increasingly seems an endangered species.

Reading is the single most important skill a child can learn -- the one skill without which chances for success are most at risk.

Today’s young people must not be allowed to turn away from long stories. After all, books are, in one sense, long-er stories. Kids who don’t read -- newspapers, magazines or books -- will be ill-equipped to live and compete in contemporary society.

It’s natural for young people to be impatient. The desire for immediate gratification is virtually a synonym for childhood. But I worry about the ubiquity of the quick hit, the quick fix. I’ve seen it in my own home.

My wife and I are big readers, and we were pretty strict about television-watching when our son was young. “Sesame Street” was one of the few shows we allowed Lucas to watch, and I can still remember how much even that excellent, clearly educational program troubled me.

“Everything happens so quickly,” I said the first time I saw the show. “It’s all bang-bang-bang, quick cuts, big visuals, constant action. No wonder kids have trouble staying focused in school these days. Almost any teacher will seem slow and boring compared to ‘Sesame Street.’ ”

Lucas is 13 now, and while he’s an excellent student, he is not a big reader. Sure, he reads the newspaper sports section, and he subscribes to Sports Illustrated and Baseball Weekly and, on occasion, he’ll find a book that engages him. When that happens, he devours it. But it doesn’t happen often.

Reading is not his first, second, third or fourth choice for leisure-time activity. He’d rather play sports or video games or play on his computer or watch TV. The same is true of many of his friends.

At his age, neither I nor my friends had video games or a computer, and we watched television only occasionally. But I read voraciously and became so friendly with the local librarian that she used me (and the magic tricks my father taught me) to lure other kids into the library.

Lucy and I have debated insisting that Lucas read more, but we don’t want to turn reading into a chore. So we’ve decided on encouragement and hope -- hope that as his interests broaden, he’ll come across more subjects, stories and, yes, books that interest him.

Of course, if he doesn’t start to read more, I’ll have to consider teaching him a few magic tricks. Maybe we could start by making Jann Wenner, Ed Needham, our television set and Xbox disappear.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.