BIO
Mark Armstrong founded Longreads in 2009. It started out as a Twitter hashtag and account dedicated to sharing essays and magazine-length stories from across the web. Longreads has since grown into a National Magazine Award-winning magazine and podcast with more than 18 million readers and listeners.
Longreads has been hailed by The New York Times, Time magazine, and New York magazine for sparking a renaissance in longform writing on the internet. In 2014, Longreads was acquired by Automattic, parent company of WordPress.com and Tumblr.
Mark works at the intersection of storytelling and digital media. He’s creator and host of Everything I’ve Learned, a podcast about lessons, mistakes, and creative risk-taking. He ran editorial special projects for Automattic, producing Distributed, a podcast about the future of work hosted by CEO (and WordPress cofounder) Matt Mullenweg. Mark previously led content and communications strategy for startups including Pocket (acquired by Mozilla).
INTERVIEWS, PODCASTS & WRITING
- Everything I’ve Learned podcast: Naz Riahi on Pursuing Your Dream During a Pandemic (2021)
- The Remote Divide (October 2020)
- Everything I’ve Learned: Reader Funding and Paid Memberships (March 2020)
- Interview: Recurring Payments on WordPress and the Future of Funding Publishers and Small Business (The Verge, 2019)
- Inside the Grand Meetup (Distributed Podcast, 2019): Interviews with Automattic employees about remote work and the importance of meeting in-person.
- Longreads Podcast: Author Jonathan Mooney on How Schools Fail Kids with Learning Differences
- Longreads Podcast: The Podcast That Explains Why We’re All Wrong
- Longreads Celebrates Ten Years at Housing Works in New York City (2019)
- Making the Case for Distributed Work in Seattle and Across the U.S. (Op-ed, Seattle Times, 2018)
- Amid the wreckage of fallen startups, Longreads is increasing the original reporting it funds (Nieman Lab, 2017)
- Automattic, Steward of WordPress.com, Snaps Up Longreads (Bloomberg, 2014)
- Longreads Partners with The Atlantic (2013)
- The Short Story of Longreads, According to Founder Mark Armstrong (GigaOm, 2013)
- New Media Innovators (New York Magazine, 2011):
“The Internet’s best collection of reading material.” - Long-form Journalism Finds an Online Friend (David Carr, The New York Times, 2010)