The IdeaLists

by Max Linsky

I’ve got some good news: despite what you may have heard, the human mind has not lost its capacity to process information in chunks larger than 140 characters. For proof, look no further than the unlikely resurgence of longform journalism, a style of storytelling that had been left for dead just a few years ago.

At the time, conventional wisdom held that nobody wanted to read 5,000 words anymore, especially not on a web browser. Journalism was being whittled down, and in-depth feature pieces were starting to feel anachronistic. Magazines started relegating their long articles to weird, untended corners of their sites; many newspapers just cut feature writing altogether.

And they weren’t entirely wrong. Readers were spending less time with stories online than they had in print. But the problem was misdiagnosed. It wasn’t attention spans—readers hadn’t suddenly stopped enjoying great stories. It was about the experience.

As reading environments go, the browser is terrifically bad. You can’t save your place. The page is cluttered with ads and auto-generated links to things that have, at best, a tangential relationship to what you’re reading. In an economy based on pageviews, once you’ve started a story the publisher is actually incentivized to get you to stop reading it and click onto something new. No wonder readers weren’t engaging with 5,000-worders.

So what happened? Well, the Kindle happened. And the iPhone and the iPad. Suddenly, millions of people owned devices designed for reading. And a few of them were developers.

A trio of tools created after the iPhone—Instapaper, Read It Later, and Readability—all perform the same core function, which is at once simple and revolutionary. With the click of a button on your web browser, they let you save or “time-shift” an article to your device, so you can read it later when you have time. It’s like DVR for the Internet. And just as important, all three services allow you to read the story in a clean, stripped-down, text-only view. They transform those cluttered web pages into ones you would see in a book.

Turns out, people like reading that way. Read It Later has millions of users. Readability was David Pogue’s favorite tool of 2009. And Instapaper has been the top paid news iPad app for months on end.

But the renaissance around longform journalism isn’t just about tools. It’s also about content.

Despite the tough times and shrinking page counts, several stalwarts have maintained their commitment to longform journalism. Big magazines like The New Yorker and GQ are still doing their thing; so are regional publications like Texas Monthly and smaller ones like Guernica.

And a host of new titles—The Awl, Capital New York, ProPublica—have made longform a key part of their strategy. One new outfit, The Atavist, exclusively publishes long stuff for the Kindle, iPhone and iPad.

But don’t worry.They’re all on Twitter, too.

Max Linsky is the co-founder of Longform.org, a site that curates longform journalism designed to be read with Instapaper, Read It Later and Readability.