The Rise of Longform Web Journalism
Every year Nick Denton (the guy who built Gawker and turned it into a $300m media empire) puts out a memo about the state of journalism and publishing on the web. It’s always interesting to see what someone at the forefront of an industry is seeing and this year’s memo is no different.
Absent from the memo is much talk about longform web journalism. Over the past few years this category has developed into more of a cohesive writing form. Instead of pithy blog entries of only two or three articles, longform has embraced articles that routinely take thirty to forty minutes or more to read. Here are some examples of some good ones I’ve read in the past week or two.
- Kickoff: Madden NFL and the Future of Video Game Sports (Grantland)
- The Caging of America (The New Yorker)
- The New French Hacker-Artist Underground (Wired)
- Smoke Screening (Vanity Fair)
Longform is great for a couple of reasons. It’s interesting and intellectually much more stimulating than a lot of other web content. I love having a cache of long interesting pieces to choose from if I don’t feel like reading my book on my commute every morning. Most importantly, it is legitimizing the idea of “reading stuff on the internet.”
While Denton’s memo points out a lot of other interesting trends, I think longform is definitely one you should look into if you’re not already aware of it. Two great resources to finding articles are Longform.org and Give Me Something to Read.
