Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

Despite all the talk of the death of magazines and newspapers, it’s actually easier than ever before to read great long-form journalism.

Most, if not all, major publications place their content online. But unless you spend all day surfing magazine websites and skimming RSS feeds like an 11-year-old hopped up on Mountain Dew, you’re not going to find all the great stuff out there.

Fortunately, I recently found two websites that can help you find great long-form features online.

Longform.org and Long Reads are both very similar and they curate features new and old from magazines, papers and websites. They’re both run out of Brooklyn, so the focus is mostly American publications. They’re both big fans of the Instapaper app for your iPhone, which helps mobile users read articles by stripping them of fancy website formatting and saves them later.

Both of the services look like labours of love and both Longform.org and Long Reads on Twitter, so why not follow them both? Another useful long-form gold mine is Give Me Something To Read which is a selection of articles saved by Instapaper users.

I heard a few months back about a pretty forward thinking project by the Journal Register newspaper company in the U.S. called the Ben Franklin Project.

The papers would publish their print editions and websites using nothing but free tools and crowdsourced journalism.

From their site:

The Journal Register Company’s Ben Franklin Project is an opportunity to re-imagine the newsgathering process with the focus on Digital First and Print Last. Using only free tools found on the Internet, the project will – from assigning to editing- create, publish and distribute news content on both the web and in print.

Traditionally the model has been for the reporter/editor to determine what should be covered and how it should be covered. That story would then weave its way through the journalistic process – reporters gathering facts from the usual stable of sources and the editors guiding the efforts – before ending on the printed page. From there the vast majority of newspapers have then pushed those stories onto the web. They are literally going from a slow medium to fast. And that’s just backwards both in timing and audience desires.

The project involved some 18 publications and wrapped up over the July 4th weekend. The projects appear to be a success and there are definitely a lot of very exciting lessons here for adventurous publications. I’ve listed some of them below, but there’s lots to mine here from the BFP’s blog. (more…)