AFTERWORD Credit the Projo for still going long BY BRIAN C. JONES

In my really, really long essay for last week’s 25th anniversary edition of the Providence Phoenix ("The need for news: Notes from an ex-ProJo writer"), I recounted the extended debate in journalism circles about long stories, noting, "The betting at the big papers is that long stories are circulation killers," because of a belief that readers lack time and papers don’t want to devote the space for them. I made that comment in a long list of reasons why it has been a thrill for me to be able to jump from the Providence Journal to the Phoenix, after leaving the ProJo two years ago during a buyout program following a really long (35-year) career there.

It’s true, as anyone who has waded through that long essay and the many features I’ve written for the Phoenix would know, that this alternative weekly does allow its writers to write long pieces — a length that I think is critical, if complex stories are to be responsible and understandable. But reading my essay not long after it was published, I felt I’d given the impression that the Journal is among the mainstream papers that have fallen into trap pioneered by USA Today: using short stories as an ideal way to make newspapers really short on information and therefore irrelevant.

It should be clear to anyone reading the excellent series that Journal medical writer Felice J. Freyer began on October 26 — about the treatment and recovery of Gina Gauvin, who was burned severely in the Station nightclub fire — that the Journal still publishes appropriately long and detailed stories. In this past year alone, the ProJo has published other takeouts that took in-depth runs at important topics. These include the reprise of the case of former Warwick detective Scott Hornoff, wrongly convicted in the murder of a lover, written by Gerald M. Carbone and Cathleen F. Crowley; and an exploration of killer qualities of the type of foam insulation that caught fire at the Station, written by G. Wayne Miller and Peter B. Lord.

The Journal, since its 1997 sale to Belo Corporation of Dallas, has a long list of sins to answer for: trying to beat up its biggest labor union and not telling the public much of anything about that dispute; ignoring other stories about which the paper may have a self interest; shunning a range of dense but important public policy subjects like taxation. But not being admirably long-winded, at least so far, isn’t among the Journal’s shortcomings.