Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

If you ask around the journalism industry, lovers of long-form journalism noticed something rather disturbing. There are simply fewer of the long-form profiles and features they love to read.

It’s not hard to see why. Forced by shrinking revenues, newspapers and magazines have had to cut page counts, slash expenses and staff and cut the rates and salaries for their writers.

But recently, a number of technological developments have given writers and readers of long-form journalism some hope. A look at some of them:

1. Instapaper and Read it Later

If you think about how you read online, it becomes very clear that most, if not all, of your online reading happens at your desktop or laptop computer. It’s only been in the last few years that smartphones and tablets have become mainstream devices and an important way for many people to read online content.

Enter Instapaper (and similar application Read It Later). These apps allow you to “timeshift your reading.” Articles that you find while browsing during the day (admit it, you’re checking other websites when you’re at work) can be saved on Instapaper and Read it Later to be read on your smartphone or tablet.

A service like Readability also raises interesting ways that publishers can make money from long-form content. (more…)

First of all, I want to wish the team at Torontoist.com a congratulations on their purchase by St. Joseph Media. A lot of work has gone into that site and every contributor and editor to the site has had a small (or large) part in the success of the site. As a former editor and long-time contributor to Torontoist, and someone who still has many friends on the masthead of the site, I can’t help but feel a bit of pride to see it go to an owner that I hope will allow the site to grow even more.

This post actually goes out to the folks at St. Joseph Media. So what actually did you buy here? Just a domain name and a seven-year-old logo? Actually, you’ve bought something more than that, a lot more. Lets face it competition is growing for Toronto Life — your flagship publication and the publication that stands the most to gain from your Torontoist purchase. Just in the last few months you’ve got the Globe going upscale in printing and paper quality in an effort to chase high-end magazine advertisers, TorStar is retooling eye Weekly and lately that scrappy publication has been trying to muscle in on your turf. Even BlogTO is nibbling at the edges with their restaurant and store round-ups. So how does buying Torontoist help you? (more…)

Last week Emily Bell, one of the key editors behind the Guardian’s highly successful web presence and head of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, spoke at Samara Canada.

A number of great write-ups of the post have been written. Mathew Ingram’s is here and there’s one from my friend Dana Lacey at J-Source. There’s also a liveblog from Samara available. I’ve pulled out five things that I got from Emily’s highly informative speech. (more…)

Photo taken by Flickr user Brenderous

The Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote a great post (based on a lecture he delivered in Toronto) on eight trends that could have a big impact on journalism this year.

Benton touched on a big range of technological, economic and cultural trends that are already changing the industry but one of the things that Benton doesn’t explore much is how storytelling is changing in journalism.

Many of the tools of online journalism open up new ways to tell stories beyond the simple inverted pyramid or even the long-form feature, the proverbial meat and potatoes of day-to-day journalism.

I’ve listed some of them below. This list isn’t complete by any stretch of the imagination, but it is some of the more interesting new storytelling forms and ideas I’ve come across. (more…)

I suppose it was only a matter of time until Tumblr became a part of the news ecosystem.

A lot of users go to Tumblr for funny animated gifs or photos of hot girls but the recent events in Egypt actually saw Tumblr become a place to find great coverage, analysis and photos of the uprising in that country.

The blogging service has apparently rolled out edited tag pages, in this case #Egypt, to pull together the best content being published about that story. The Atlantic, which has an active presence on Tumblr, is one of the editors, which gives this little experiment some mainstream media cred.

It’s not as important as Twitter, or al-Jazeera’s compelling live coverage from Cairo, but it’s an interesting use of the Tumblr platform and the addition of human curation makes the feed much more usable than Twitter — do a search for #egypt and #jan25 and you’re inundated in seconds.

One of the single biggest changes to my reading habits since I got my smartphone is how I’ve ‘timeshifted’ my reading. Like a lot of people, I surf the internet while I’m at work. In fact, my job would be impossible if I didn’t. But the middle of the day isn’t the best time to read a 10,000 word article from the New York Review of Books or a feature in the Walrus. In the old days, I would’ve bookmarked the article, e-mailed it to myself or marked it off in my RSS reader to read when I got home.

Now, I find myself doing something a little bit different. Using apps like Instapaper or Read It Later, I simply save articles to read later (usually on the commute home). It’s not unlike using your PVR to record your favourite show, or downloading podcasts because you can’t be glued to your radio at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning. (more…)

A few weeks ago Harper’s publisher John R. MacArthur wrote one of the most misguided anti-internet essays I’ve read in a long, long time.

Entitled “I won’t hug this file — I won’t even call it my friend,” MacArthur blames the internet for impoverishing writers, being “anti-democratic” and “anti-emotional” and probably killing his pet cat if he had one.

I’m not going to waste too much energy or effort taking apart MacArthur’s essay but I will instead point to a few other magazines similar to Harper’s who are choosing to embrace the internet and are better off because of it. (more…)

A few magazines I know (the Walrus, Toronto Life) have tried trailers to mixed results. National Geographic hits it out of the park with this trailer for their year-long series on global population.

Of course, they also have some really great content on their site once the trailer has piqued your interest. Well executed.

On a side note: National Geographic, would it kill you to include sharing on Twitter and Facebook (not to mention StumbleUpon and Reddit) as part of your story pages? Digg, Yahoo! Bookmarks and Delicious? C’mon.

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…)