Longform: Good, long journalism, 4000 words and up

http://longform.org/

by jimmybot • 16 years ago

75 14 16 years ago

longform.org

aaronbrethorst• 16 years ago

tl; dr.

ihodes• 16 years ago

Love it!

Perhaps a simple tagging/categories mechanism, crowd-sourced or by the editors. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a certain type of article, and having the simple recommendation that it's of the "US/National/Politics" genre is enough to make me hit "Read Later" when I otherwise wouldn't.

A nice layout, as well. Kudos!

Also, were it to be extensively curated and organized, perhaps with 1 sentence blurbs about the articles, and frequently updated, I'd pay a nominal fee for it, if that's a direction you'd be interested in going with it.

peregrine• 16 years ago

It depends completely on the quality of curating, but yes I agree. I feel like I've been looking for something of this nature. Reading long articles won't hurt my shortening attention span, I hope.

karzeem• 16 years ago

This is perfect. By far my biggest complaint about Instapaper is that I can't find enough content to save to it — anything shorter than a few thousand words feels too insignificant to save for later.

A couple suggestions: I think the front page could be two to three times as long. Also, the "Read Later" button doesn't feel very button-y. My first thought was "Why does every article have a bookmarklet for me to drag to my toolbar?" It would probably be better as a link. Lastly, could the word "Instapaper" and the fact of the site's integration with it be more prominent? I had to hover over a Read Later button to figure out what would happen when I clicked it. (I suspected that it would save to Instapaper, but that's largely because of the aforementioned bookmarklet-ish look.)

I second ihodes' sentiment that this is not far from being something I'd pay for.

Edit: on second thought, I'd only multiply the number of articles per page by 1.5–2.

joshu• 16 years ago

good name.

krisneuharth• 16 years ago

I like this since I tend to enjoy more in depth treatments of interesting subjects. I would suggest that you place an RSS link in a more prominent location than buried in the FAQ section. Also, it would be nice if you could embed the link to the original story in the RSS feed, even just appended to the description. I'm sure I am in the minority here but I do not own any Apple mobile device so RSS is more important to me than Instapaper.

jsb• 16 years ago

If you like this, you might also like the well-curated Give Me Something to Read at http://givemesomethingtoread.com/

jimmybot• 16 years ago

Are those comments directed at me? I'm not the creator of longform.org; just wanted to share a great site with everyone.

Estragon• 16 years ago

I haven't used instapaper before, so I might be missing something. But I just signed up for instapaper, then clicked on one of the "read later" buttons on the longform page. This took me to a registration page for instapaper, which nonetheless recognized that I was logged in to the email address I'd given it.

JacobAldridge• 16 years ago

Interesting article on Longform that also links to his favourite articles - http://www.slate.com/id/2251794/

pbiggar• 16 years ago

If you like this, you might also like NewsTilt: a curated list of excellent journalists, who want to engage their readers: http://newstilt.com.

CytokineStorm• 16 years ago

Interesting coincidence... I just went to a talk by MIT professor Sherry Turkle where she mentioned that publishers were questioning if the 'longform' of her book (~17,000 words I think) could actually sell. Her answer was that the only way to adequately deal with the complex issues she addressed was in this format.

whatusername• 16 years ago

17,000 words is not a long book? was that supposed to be 170,000? Or just in the sense that she wrote a long article and is trying to pass it off as a book?

http://www.brandonsanderson.com/article/56/Splitting-AMOL has a description of what happens when a book gets too long (400,000 words)

marknutter• 16 years ago

Looks like a great companion for my site: http://synopit.com

Longform: Good, long journalism, 4000 words and up

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