We have some big news to share today: Longreads is teaming up with The Atlantic, in a partnership that will allow us to expand our site and membership model—and continue to serve this community of readers, writers and publishers.
When I first started the #longreads hashtag four years…
Very excited about this. Thanks to everyone who has participated in this community over the past four years, and we’re looking forward to more.
This week’s discussion about paying writers has led some to argue that publishers, by asking for free or cheap work, and writers, by accepting little to no wages, are devaluing the work of professional writers.
What else is devaluing the work of professional writing on the web?
1. By having this debate, for free, on Twitter.com, Branch.com and Tumblr.com, are we devaluing the work of professional writers who might write about it for a publisher that is paying them?
2. If you wrote a print magazine story for a publisher, then asked that publisher to “unlock it on the web for free,” are you undercutting or devaluing the work of those who write exclusively for the web?
3. If you only share free content on Twitter and Facebook, versus paywalled content or ebooks, are you undercutting or devaluing the work of publishers who paywall their content?
4. If you publish free content on the web, are you killing the ancillary revenue that a writer could bring in from future reprint rights for those stories, or the ability to repurpose those stories into a book?
5. If you pay freelancers, are you killing the opportunity to provide healthcare and stability to a full-time writer instead?
I’m not trying to be flip, but I think we, the Internet, are all somewhat responsible for the sorry state of freelance writing. I hope we can take steps to improve it.
For what it’s worth, Longreads is trying to do its small part: We currently set aside ~30% of our Member dues to pay writers and publishers for reprint rights to our weekly Member Picks.
And last night, Pocket’s founder Nate Weiner spoke at the SF Hacks/Hackers journalism panel and asserted our commitment to publishers and how we can help solve the bigger problem of supporting high-quality content on the web. I’m excited for what’s to come on this front.
Dean Starkman, Mathew Ingram and Gangrey are all continuing the conversation about whether there is a “Longform Meltdown” at the major newspapers.
Since I don’t think the data shows anything as dramatic as what Starkman and CJR’s headline suggests—and putting aside the question of whether “longform” means narrative or investigative or both—I thought I’d ask a new question: Is there a better way to gauge how longform stories and the people who publish them are faring in 2013? I’d personally love to track the following:
1. Total # of publishers who produce more than 6 longform stories per year—and pay writers for them.
2. Total # of longform writers who have healthcare.
3. Total # of freelance longform writers whose number of assignments and revenue from those pieces is growing year over year.
4. Diversity of bylines
5. Total # of publishers who hire and train new reporters with a focus on narrative / investigative journalism.
Dean Starkman’s piece feels oddly timed, especially when you think about the number of outstanding stories being shared in the Longreads community every day and the popularity of long-form content in Pocket.
1. Starkman is examining just four newspapers (The New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times), leaving out papers like the Tampa Bay Times, who are dedicated to great storytelling.
2. It appears the number of long-form stories are actually on the upswing at the NYT and Washington Post since 2011—just as tablet and smartphone adoption was growing. That leaves the Los Angeles Times (which still does great work) and the Wall Street Journal. The latter has been quite clear about its desire to go shorter.
3. As a commenter noted on Romenesko, is there a correlation with the drop in overall space in the print edition of these newspapers?
4. Even if newspapers are cutting their long-form content, it’s a missed opportunity, because they’d be the only ones doing so. Online publishers like Deadspin, The Awl and The Verge and niche magazine publishers are only deepening their commitment to this storytelling.
Our latest Exclusive comes from Andrew Rice, a contributing editor to New York magazine whose work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and we’re excited to feature “The…
Super story from Andrew Rice about what happens when you’re a pastor accused of working for Satan.
As a side note, I could not be happier with how the Longreads Membership is shaping up. With Members’ support, we’re expanding our curation to include the best storytelling that’s not on the web—and we’re paying writers and publishers for their work.
Still lost in the ongoing discussion about long-form storytelling being “back” is one (of many!) important questions we should ask: What should long-form storytelling look like when it is native to the web?
For Longreads, the vast majority of stories shared within our community were first created for (and funded by) print publications—then, later, they’re posted online. So these stories are what they are because of rules and formats and budgets dictated by print magazines.
Now, we’re starting to see that mix change dramatically, as more online publishers embrace long-form content. What started with publishers like The Morning News, The Awl and The Rumpus has now expanded to Gawker Media, The Verge, SB Nation, BuzzFeed, Narratively, Grantland, Pitchfork, The Onion A.V. Club and the recently Kickstarted Matter.
Across both print and online-native publications, we’re seeing beautiful experimentation with layouts and multimedia—check out Pitchfork’s latest feature on Bat for Lashes, or The Verge’s story and documentary on “basement body hackers”—but I think the most underrated advantage to online storytelling is the ability to serialize.
Two of my favorite long-form franchises over the past few years could be described as serials: “Scandals of Classic Hollywood,” by Anne Helen Petersen for The Hairpin, and 2010’s “Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?”, by Steven Hyden for The AV Club. They’re not classic long-form narratives—maybe they’re just columns?—but the effect is the same. Writers commit themselves to exploring a topic, then they construct the larger story over the course of many weeks and months, allowing time to build an audience. If you miss a chapter, or come in late, you can always go back. It’s great for marketing, because the installments give writers and publishers new reasons to promote their series across Twitter and Facebook over a longer period of time.
Maybe this approach is obvious to everybody else, but I think there’s a lot more to explore here.
This past week we’ve seen a few more serialized (print-first) stories grab readers’ attention: There was chapter one of Pamela Colloff’s crime story, “The Innocent Man, Part One,” in Texas Monthly; Austin Carr’s three-part series on the rise and fall of Hipstamatic in Fast Company; and Dan Barry’s 5-part New York Times series on Elyria, Ohio.
If I were a writer with a great idea for a 15,000-word ebook or an 8,000-word magazine feature, I would consider serializing them—one chapter and one cliffhanger at a time.
In my next installment, I’ll explore who’s going to pay for all this. Stay tuned!
Our latest Exclusive comes from author Elissa Schappell, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and co-founder and editor at large of Tin House, which is where she published “How the Light Gets In”—a story about a life changed by seizures. See it here.
p.s. You can support Longreads—and get more exclusives like this—by becoming a member.
A beautiful story, and thanks Elissa and Tin House for taking part.
Read It Later users keep content on their tablets and phones for an average of 96 hours after they’ve saved it. What does that say about the lifespan of content and how we value it?
The other night I had this nightmare that I was trapped in a hot-dog eating contest.
It was an extreme hot-dog eating competition, hosted inside a dystopian terrordome. Thugs in lycra shorts pointed hot dog cannons at our faces, bombarding us with thousands of franks. It was a Mad Max-meets-Gray’s Papaya world where split-second decisions were critical: Which franks would we try to eat? And which would we simply let bounce off our foreheads, plummeting into a pile of waste on the floor of the Hot Dog Terrordome?
It wasn’t a pleasant way to eat. Besides the questions of manners, etiquette and hygiene, it simply wasn’t efficient to have food shot at you. There was no way to collect it, save it, or eat it, on our own terms.
I awoke the next morning shaken, but thankful that humanity has embraced a different method for eating food. We have plates, Tupperware… even refrigerators where we can store food that we’ve collected, with plans to consume it over the days, weeks and months ahead.
But as I returned to work in digital media, I started having flashbacks. It occurred to me:
Why Is Online Content Still Being Shot At Us?
With content on the web, it feels like we’re living in a Hot Dog-Shooting Terrordome:
-A place where it is sprayed at you faster than you can consume it;
-A world where there are just two profitable modes of operation: Faster, and more;
-A business where the accepted distribution strategy is one in which publishers are forced to drop their most valuable product into a cannon and fire as many rounds as possible at its audience, no matter whether they can even consume it (and, importantly, no way to tell whether they did consume it).
What Are We Doing Wrong?
No one seems happy with the results. The way we are forced to consume devalues the content, it leads to diminishing returns for businesses that must see pageview growth year over year, and it leads to burnout of even the hungriest news staff.
Ultimately, it has forced publishers and writers to change the way they create content. Felix Salmon recenty noted that the speed of blogging is getting so fast that it practically doesn’t matter what he writes. In an attempt to keep his team excited, Gawker’s new editor A.J. Daulerio enacted a system where one writer is assigned to the “traffic-whoring,” while the others get more time to cook up something that takes more time and reporting.
It’s a creative solution to a seemingly unsolveable problem—how publishers can embrace the rapidly-increasing demands for content without losing their commitment to quality.
But there’s a bigger challenge for the media business: How can we change the ecosystem and evolve to a model that puts renewed attention on quality over quantity?
One answer, which I’ll present here in completely biased fashion, is to give control back to the consumers of this content. Let people take content with them, and they will soon value it more highly than if it is shot at them. Content creators will be rewarded with a longer social lifespan for the stories and videos they work so hard to create. And that ultimately lifts the value of a media brand. I believe this is actually possible.
How We Got Here
“Too much information” existed long before Twitter and—for anyone who’s had a stack of unread newspapers sitting in their den—long before the Internet. But Twitter’s real-time, reverse chronological stream exacerbated the problem. New content is now valued above all else, and our “old” content expires much more quickly.
According to data gathered last fall by URL shortening service Bit.ly, links shared on Twitter had an average “half-life” of 2.8 hours. That is: After just three hours, most links on Twitter already accumulated 50% of the clicks they will ever receive from that shortened URL. The half-life for a link shared on Facebook was slightly longer but no less fleeting: 3.2 hours.
In this study, the type of content mattered: The half-life was even shorter for breaking news, but for videos on YouTube, the attention span lengthened dramatically, to more than 7 hours. It’s both heartening to see that the Twittersphere responds to the right content, but depressing to see how many people got really excited that YouTube’s half-life was 7 hours. Content should have a much longer life than that.
Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand used the Bit.ly report to underscore the power of “second chance tweets”—that is, repeating a message or link to make sure it’s seen by as many people as possible. (Also known as ICYMI Disease.)
That’s fine, I suppose, but it feels like an inefficient hack. Can’t we create an ecosystem where the network does the ICYMI for us?
The Lifespan of Longreads
I know we can do better than a 7-hour half-life, and I’ve seen it firsthand in my experience with Longreads, the community I founded in 2009. I started the service on Twitter, using a hashtag (#longreads) to create a community and a new taxonomy to discover and share stories over 1,500 words. In the past year we’ve had more than 10,000 stories shared. For these stories, retweets can happen hours, days, weeks and even months after the link was first shared.
In many cases, Longreaders are reading a story the old-fashioned way—immediately after clicking on a link that interests them. But in other cases, they are saving the link to “read later”—using a time-shifting app like Read It Later (where I’m an editorial advisor). For Read It Later’s 4 million users, they now have a place to keep the content that they think will be interesting or enlightening. They can return to it when they have time for a 2,000-, 4,000-, or 26,000-word story—say, on the couch at night, or on a commute, or on a flight.
So, if you’re still thinking about hot dogs, time-shifting could be the “takeout bag”—or the dinner plate, or the refrigerator. You get the idea. The simple logic is this: Give a user the opportunity to save something, and they will have access to it for a longer period of time, increasing the odds over time that they will eventually consume it. This will occur at the time and place of their choosing.
Not only that, but once they consume it, they will share it at the time they complete it, and they will have effectively extended the half-life of that particular URL on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. It’s a new long tail for the post-SEO world.
For publishers, time-shifting can mean the difference between 3 hours, 7 hours—and a number like 96 hours. That last number is the average length of time a Read It Later user keeps an article or a video in their queue before they mark it as viewed.
The Read It Later data has revealed some other interesting patterns as well:
As we start to dig into consumption patterns, we see that users are controlling when and how they engage with content. It doesn’t mean there’s less of it, and the content is still being shot at us, but we now have tools to help capture this content and put it to use when the moment is right.
This, the digital equivalent of a takeout bag, may just help us rethink how we value content on the web. And for publishers, it can help us rethink what we create.
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Special thanks to illustrator Ian Marsden (@marsdencartoons) for bringing my hot-dog nightmares to life.
My first official data report for Read It Later: Who Are the ‘Most Read’ Authors?
This will be the first of many pieces looking at how, in the era of the “read later” button, we can redefine what it means to be a popular author or publisher. We now have a much more well-rounded view of content and how it is valued by readers. Loyalty, longevity and depth all come into play here. Kind of exciting.
At least one of Chris Jones’s stories will be on my own Top 5.
Chris Jones is a writer at large for Esquire. (His stories are on many of your Top Fives.) He’s currently blogging at My Second Empire.
David Grann: The Mark of a Masterpiece, The New Yorker, July 12, 2010
Just a perfectly constructed, painful reveal of the sinister side of the art world, starting at its origins, with the artist’s fingerprints.
Michael Kruse: Stories of LeBron and sportswriter intertwined, tangled, The St. Petersburg Times, Nov. 21, 2010
Maybe the best way to approach an over-covered subject: write about him by writing about someone else. (See Breslin, Jimmy. Digging JFK Grave was His Honor.)
Eli Saslow: For a look outside the presidential bubble, Obama reads 10 personal letters a day, The Washington Post, March 31, 2010
For a look inside the presidential bubble, report the hell out of the story of a single letter.
CJ Chivers: A Firsthand Look at Firefights in Marja, The New York Times, April 19, 2010
Every time CJ Chivers heads off to war and sends back a story, I feel like less of a man and less of a writer.
Tom Junod: Eating the Whole Animal, from the Inside-Out, Esquire, April 2010
Pure entertainment by one of the all-time great magazine writers. Also contains the sentence: “The veins are what freaked me out.” Impossible to resist. Reading, not eating, that is.
