Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The revival of long form writing online... The last few months has seen this trend change and have seen the revival of long form writing online. Long form content journalism and in-depth storytelling online are making a comeback. While most articles are still short and quick to read, more and more blogs are publishing long-form features of 2,000+ words, which include photos and videos and need a lot of time invested from the reader to go through it.

There seems to be a growing appetite from the web audience for these kind of features as proved by the popularity and social media spread of these. A recent statistical study on what makes online content go viral has found that long form articles are shared far more often than shorter articles. Word count of a post seems very closely related to the number of shares.

Just look at the success of http://longreads.com/, http://longform.org/, and social media hashtags like #longreads and #longform. Here are some very successful examples of long form articles: Michael Jordan Has Not Left The Building feature on ESPN, beautiful Snow Fall in the New York Times and several profiles on the Forbes including this one of Sean Parker....

It is understandable that publishers want to take what works in one medium and replicate it as closely as possible on another and then hope to duplicate the business model minus a good chunk of the costs. But it is a strategy unlikely to be successful because it takes an antiquated view of our reading behaviour, namely insisting the magazine formatted reading experience is as relevant as it was 15 years ago when clearly it is not.

Take the research coming out of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, a collaboration with The Economist Group, which shows that while 77% of tablet owners use their tablet daily, and 53% read news on their tablet every day, only 14% have paid for content on their tablet....