Of all the things I love to read, long form is my favourite
I have enjoyed long form journalism for a very long time. I like a story that's lengthy enough to grow familiar: events I can dread or anticipate, characters I can get to know and watch change. I like going on that journey.
Long form used to be a bit of a rare beast, but this has changed over the past year. There are more places to get your long form fix these days, and more and more of them are online.
Curiously enough, while the rest of the publishing industry endures a series of beatings from the world wide web, things in the long form corner are starting to look brighter.
'Long form' doesn't just mean 'long'
First, a primer. Long form is a very specific convention of journalism which is about extensive research, personal experience, investigation and very involved storytelling. It tends to be longer (1,500 words at least, sometimes up to a delightfully meaty 10,000 or 15,000) than most of the writing we encounter online and in print. Also, articles tends to span longer time periods.
Long form invites writers to engage a more expansive prose style and a different structure. It's a different breed of reportage than you find in most Sunday papers. Frankly, it asks a lot of readers.
Further niche-ifying the situation, long form is often thought of as an American format. A lot of the writers typically associated with the form – Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Susan Orlean – are American. Sir Harold Evans was a British pioneer and brought the form to the Sunday Times, but relatively few have followed in his footsteps. Andrew O'Hagen and Colm Toibìn are two noteworthy practitioners.
Because of all this, long form hasn't traditionally had an abundance of places to call home. Certain print institutions like the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and the Atlantic; some niche titles like Outside. But frankly, it's just not everyone's cup of tea, and as most publishers are out to move product, long form not necessarily the best bet for a bestseller.
But this is changing.
From #longreads to Longreads
Longreads is dedicated to long form journalism – not creating it, but sharing the stuff that's already out there. The site is an aggregator of sorts, posting links to new long form stories every day.
Longreads relies on Twitter to track which long reads are most popular (measured by the number of times a link is shared) and then it serves those links on the homepage. In fact, the site is the most recent iteration of a service that began as a Twitter hashtag: if you were sharing a link to a long read, you tagged it
#longreads so others could find it. Done. These days there's a weekly email (the week's top 5 long form articles) and a Facebook page, but at its heart Longreads is a very simple service designed to help lovers of long form find and share their fix.
I recently spoke with founder Mark Armstrong about how Longreads came to be. History is scattered with proof points of a technical/technological change -> cultural change causality, and I wondered whether he thinks we are seeing that here. Are technological advances begetting broader behavioural shifts, or is this just a case of the web surfacing niche groups that have been there all along but now only *seem* more prevalent?
Armstrong said that when he started Longreads, in April 2009, it was in reaction to a shift in the way he read. He was no longer reading on his desktop computer at work, but rather on his phone during his commute:
I was gravitating toward (and had more time to read) longer, more in-depth pieces. This made a lot of sense, because if we think about it, we've spent most of our desktop computer time working (or at least knowing we *should* be working)—and online content was always created for those quick 3-5-minute breaks in our day.
Armstrong attests that widespread access to mobile devices – phones, tablets and arguably laptop computers – brought about a not-insignificant change in reading habits. I'm inclined to agree.
With mobile devices, online content now reaches people during periods of extended downtime—on a couch, on a commute, on an airplane. It's for these moments that I created Longreads, and I think that's one big reason why we're seeing the renewed attention from readers and publishers.
Longreads's readership supports the idea that technological changes are driving more people to read stories rather than just skim the news. Says Armstrong,
What I hear from people in the Longreads community is that people are establishing new reading habits: Reading #longreads on their iPad before bedtime, or on the bus ride to work, or on the elliptical at the gym. As community, discovery and access have become streamlined, it's been easier for readers to find those moments to dig into a deeper story.
So far, so supportive of the technology-directing-culture theory.
The Atavist
The Atavist is another new offering in the long form space. It's a boutique publishing house that produces original nonfiction stories for digital, mobile reading devices. According to the site's about page,
We created a new genre of nonfiction, a digital form that lies in the space between long narrative magazine articles and traditional books and e-books. Publishing them digitally and offering them individually—a bit like music singles in iTunes—allows us to present stories longer and in more depth than typical magazines, less expensive and more dynamic than traditional books.
Most importantly, it gives us new ways to tell some inventive, captivating, cinematic journalism—and new ways for you to experience it.
There's an explicit link here between new technologies and a new (if still slightly micro) economy around long form fiction. Stories are entirely digital and priced from $2.99 USD through the
Atavist i-OS app and $1.99 through
Amazon's Kindle Singles. Proceeds from each story are shared between the author and The Atavist.
Readers, meet Byliner
In June my dad told me about a new site called
Byliner. Like Longreads, Byliner pulls together links to long form articles, but like The Atavist it also publishes something new:
Byliner Originals. The site describes these as
Original narratives by some of the most accomplished writers working today, at lengths that allow them to be read in a single sitting. [They] typically range between 10,000 and 35,000 words and are available in digital form, with select titles also available as audio or print-on-demand books.
Byliner Originals are a saleable product – a product that couldn't exist in a pre-digital landscape. And as with The Atavist, both the publishers and the authors are making money off this product.
The Byliner Original my dad recommended was
Three Cups of Deceit, Jon Krakauer's investigation of Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greg Mortenson. It was a bestseller and a runaway success: fascinating, topical, well-written, inexpensive to buy, profitable to sell, and easy to read on just about any device. Unsurprisingly, many more have followed... and still more are to come.
Squaring the circle: from long form to film?
Something I wonder about is the crossover to film. Long form lends itself beautifully to film. Adaptation, Blue Crush and The Insider are just a few of the films – both of the artistic merit and blockbuster varieties – that have sprung from long form.
I wonder why more film studios don't try to square the circle and foster more long form journalism. Film studios could pay writers to generate articles with an aim to making them into movies. They could publish the articles as and how they like, maybe turning a secondary profit and maybe not, but the primary profit would come from the articles they opt to make into movies. It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper to commission the work in the first place for peanuts and a right to option than it must be to buy the rights to popular pieces AFTER they've become successful (and thus, I imagine, spiked in price). Anyway, it's an idea. Messrs Weinstein, are you listening?
Digital and mobile technology: firestorm, not apocalypse
Much like the forest fire that destroys the old environment so something new can grow, the relentless thrashing the internet and mobile are unleashing on just about everything we used to know is also creating something new. Specifically, growth areas we didn't previously have in an industry that desperately needs them. It's a transformative force, not a destructive one.
Last night at
storywarp there was some debate about whether long form was dying. Some people suggested the resurgence I am describing in this post is a bit of an illusion, and in fact the genre is being propped up by more profitable areas of journalism. But I don't think so. I think what we're seeing here is a small-scale example of how technological changes can bring about cultural changes in totally different spheres.
The mobile phone industry and the publishing industry had just about nothing in common until web-enabled phones made it possible for people to consume great swathes of written content on devices built for something totally different. But as new technologies are made available to us as gadgets, services and myriad products, we absorb them into our lives and shape new behaviours around them. New connections are created, and in this case, those new connections are yielding revenue streams in an industry many had written off completely.
I find this incredibly encouraging – not just as a reader, but as a writer. This is my last post as a member of the Many before I step out and try to make a living – and my own mark – as a freelance writer, and it feels like an appropriate point to end on.
Technology is good for us.
The internet is making us smarter.
I feel hopeful.
0 comments