Articles That Become Books and Medium Bending, in General

Shortly after the article's publication, Lukianoff sat for an interview with James Bennet, The Atlantic's then-editor-in-chief, and described how pleased he was with both the number of reactions the article prompted and the fact that most were so positive. As Bennet put it, "There's been a tidal wave of reaction to this piece." Presumably in response to the degree to which the piece resonated, Lukianoff and Haidt adapted the central arguments of the article to book-form, with a book -- also titled The Coddling of the American Mind -- being released with Penguin Books three years later, in September of 2018. Like the article, the book evoked a torrent of responses, some of which took the form of reviews in nearly every major publication, and it spent four weeks on The New York Times' hardcover nonfiction best-sellers list.

The Coddling of the American Mind is just one example of a popular book that began as an article or short story in a periodical. One also thinks of academic Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which had partial origins in his 1992 magazine piece in Discover titled "The Arrow of Disease." Similarly, Jon Krakauer adapted his 1993 Outside magazine feature "Death of an Innocent" on Chris McCandless into the canonical 1996 book Into the Wild, and that book, in turn, would be adapted to the Academy Award-nominated 2007 film that bears the same name. (I previously explored aspects of Krakauer's book in my 2019 Quillette essay "Thoreau and the Primitivist Temptation.") Peter Thiel's Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, which was co-written with Blake Masters, drew from Masters' 2012 course notes at Stanford University from the class Thiel was teaching; philosopher Harry Frankfurt's celebrated 2005 book On Bullshit was first a 1986 essay; the list goes on. Among fiction writers, Ernest Hemingway was perhaps the most adept practitioner of the article to book adaptation; To Have and Have Not drew from two of his short stories published in the three years preceding the novel's 1937 release.

In addition to this being interesting, at least in my view, in and of itself, the article-to-book phenomenon also invites discussion about two particularly relevant points about today's media landscape.

Firstly, today, in the age of the podcast and the Rumble video, medium bending is increasingly becoming the norm. Podcasts can become books; books can give rise to podcast series; tweets, as we saw with Nicholas Christakis' viral Twitter threads during the early days of the Coronavirus, can become fodder for articles, etc. Even television shows that aired their final episode more than a decade before can have partial reprisals in other mediums, such as took place with the creation of the recent podcast Talking Sopranos hosted by Michael Imperioli (who played Christopher Moltisanti) and Steve Schirripa (who played Bobby Baccalieri). Now to be sure, medium bending has always taken place such as was previously discussed with authors from Frankfurt to Hemingway and with television shows adapted to films and vice versa; however, today, with the sheer volume (and diversity) of new mediums now available, this can be readily accomplished, and would-be publishers and producers can quite quantitatively gauge the potential success of a more involved and expensive project (i.e., a book) based on how the shorter version fared. A single idea can be explored via a podcast episode, a series of articles, a book, and perhaps then even a Netflix original.

Secondly, as News Corporation's 2021 purchase of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's book-publishing division reminds us, news outlets primarily dealing in articles, video content and the like increasingly tend to share a parent company with publishing houses. (Another example of this, of course, is Paramount Global's current ownership of Simon & Schuster or HarperCollins also being a subsidiary of News Corp.) As such, one sees how a single media and publishing company could pursue a vertical integration of sorts, where articles, the potential building blocks of books or more production-intensive types of content, can be tested, their metrics studied, and if it is determined that they might be suitable fodder for, say, a book, this can be accomplished in house. Just as Fox News has drawn from The Wall Street Journal's editorial team for its weekend program Journal Editorial Report (prior to the 2019 creation of Fox Corporation, Fox News and The Wall Street Journalwere both owned by the original incarnation of News Corporation), media companies can readily interchange types of content through the various mediums they provide.

Now, eight-and-a-half decades after the short story "One Trip Across," which was originally published in Cosmopolitan, joined with "The Tradesman's Return," which appeared in a then-nascent Esquire, to provide the building blocks of To Have and Have Not, tweets are rapidly becoming Substack articles, which, in turn, become books (eBook or otherwise), and vice versa. And Scribner's, the publisher of To Have and Have Not, following in the trend discussed above, became part of Macmillan in 1984, then later Simon & Schuster. And as was mentioned, Simon & Schuster is now part of Paramount Global.

Although, of course, there are benefits to be found for the companies themselves that increasingly traffic in various mediums, I will close by mentioning a potential downside to be guarded against: Just as commentators have argued that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 resulted in the decline of regionalism and particularism in broadcasting as a few companies were now able to control most television stations nationwide, today, something similar might be said for the increasing consolidation of media content (from article to book). There remains the risk that said corporatization may imperil either the exploration of non-mainstream ideas or that it might select for content that is likely already to be broadly popular instead of what might be most interesting or necessary to be said.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet.