Hi friends,
If you’re reading this newsletter, odds are I may have met you through Longreads, which just celebrated its 15th birthday. I wrote a brief remembrance about those early days, and how I usually end up thinking about the late, great David Carr.
Of course, I also think about how much more wide-eyed and innocent Twitter seemed back in 2009. The idea of Longreads — and its early success — came from a unique set of circumstances:
- The iPhone was still a novelty, and reading anything on it seemed almost aspirational.
- Twitter was new and there was a communal attitude about sharing and connecting (vs. adopting pro wrestling personas and dunking on each other).
- Algorithms weren’t a thing, and human curation and hashtags helped drive discovery on social media.
- Many magazines, newspapers, and alt-weeklies were still publishing in print and giving away their articles online.
- Venture capital was funding new media companies with big budgets to do ambitious work.
Now here we are, in 2024, and so much of the news industry has collapsed. Some brilliant people whose work I featured on Longreads are no longer working in media. I hope wherever they are now, they are making more money, working better hours, and have an infinitely better quality of life. No one should ever feel like they have to be a martyr for journalism.
The tide continues to change. Patreons and Substacks help other journalists find sustainable revenue, but solo newsletters and podcasts create a new friction. It’s difficult to step away from the daily treadmill to do big projects and deep reporting. Other writers found a magic trick to driving subscriptions by specializing in sensationalism and culture war grievance peddling — the precise opposite of why nuanced longform reporting is so valuable.
When Longreads launched a membership in 2011 — with a PayPal button — I thought that reader funding would bring more quality writing to the internet vs. ad-based clickbait. But the truth is that every business model can produce cynical work.
***
If I sound like a grumpy old man feeling nostalgic about the way things used to be, I’m actually not! My kids got me off Twitter, and then got me addicted to TikTok, and I realized there’s a whole other world out there (including… the real world), full of creative people finding their communities and telling stories in new and exciting ways. Among the journalists I follow on TikTok, Jamelle Bouie is showing how it’s done.
TikTok also helped me rediscover the repressed theater kid of my childhood. Before I discovered journalism, I was making Lego movies with my friends, trying to edit them together with two VCRs and a sound mixer from Radio Shack. I was writing songs with a Casio sampler keyboard, stealing beats from my brother’s Eric B. & Rakim cassettes.
My kids can now create everything I ever dreamed of, with just a phone.
Why can’t I? Why did I decide to grow up and leave that unfiltered creativity behind, right when things were getting fun? These are questions I’m trying to answer for myself in 2024.
***
Today, Longreads lives on, with a team of editors at Automattic recommending great stories every day.
I created Longreads in 2009 because I was looking for something to read on my phone during my subway commutes. I sat on the idea for nearly a year, because I couldn’t find anyone to help me build the website. I was stuck in “the waiting room.” Waiting for someone else to validate my idea, and waiting for someone else to make it real.
One afternoon I got tired of waiting, and put the Longreads idea on Twitter as a hashtag experiment. Marco Arment from Instapaper retweeted it, then some New York Times journalists picked it up, and it took off.
Some non-journalist friends didn’t quite get what I was doing, but a bunch of people on Twitter loved it. This was an important lesson for my future creative work: Early validation, and the energy to keep going, often comes from strangers.
This is why it’s so important to put your work out into the world, in any way you can. Wonderful things can come back, from places you didn’t imagine.
And 15 years later, we’re still connected and sharing with each other.
Thanks for reading.
-Mark
Links of note
- Here in Seattle, journalists from KUOW and the Seattle Times just released the final episode of “Lost Patients,” a must-listen podcast that investigates how America’s mental health care system has failed so many.
- When someone creates a newsletter or podcast that is consistently great for many years, they often don’t get recognized in the traditional media, because there’s no “news peg.” But it’s wonderful to see Rusty Foster and Today in Tabs get the profile treatment in the New York Times.
- Over at Ursa Story Company, we have another new podcast launching soon (and you are going to love it), so sign up for updates there if you’d like to be notified. We’re also producing shows for other clients, so if you’d like to work together, get in touch (mark [at] ursastory.com).