Wrong-form

One journalistic anachronism in need of reform - I say reform because the other option is elimination - is the long-form profile. As currently constituted, it is ghastly: prolix, pretentious, and preening, usually written with a fanboy's discernment. There's no need to blow 10,000 words to ask a notable person out on a date.

Outside of source greasing - an ass-kissing profile written in exchange for future material, which the average person might understand but not approve - profiles serve little journalistic purpose and generally remain as unread as a Minoan tablet written in Linear A.

So what would replace them?

The obvious choice is Q&As. If readers are genuinely interested in a person, it's reasonable to assume they'd like to get the details straight from the horse's mouth without words such as "deeply" and "passionate" being fired with Gatling gun frequency. What style points among peers the reporter will lose will be reimbursed by a trenchant line of questioning. And if ass must be kissed - it seems it must - it's easy enough to do just that by fawning after a record button is pressed.

An Axios bullet point approach could work as well. Cover the valence issues (bullet point: motivation, bullet point: solutions proposed, bullet point: greatest fears, etc., etc.), throw in a few quotes, and get the reader in and out with a minimum of ceremony. Boiling things down is more difficult than fluffing them up, so a reporter would still get credit for hard work and devotion to craft.

What people call print journalism is over as a mass market phenomenon. Everything should be on the table. It's another example of management failure over the last 20 years that proposals such as this haven't been honed into something folks would like to read.