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.

2. Longform.org and Longreads

I’ve written about both of these services before and both of them are excellent ways to find out long-form stories. Curatorial communities and services like Longform and Longreads (not to mention your own social media outreach) can help writers and publishers reach larger and more engaged audiences.

I expect to see certain publications (hello literary journals!)  to reach out to services like Longform and Longreads to raise their profiles and attract readers.

3. Kindle Singles

Kindle Singles are Amazon’s entry into the long-form game. They allow publishers to sell short works for a few dollars a piece on Amazon’s popular e-book platform. Amazon already has some great content for the format: TEDbooks, the New York Times, ProPublica. Seth Godin has also launched his Domino Project, which he touts as a “a fundamental shift in the way books (and digital media based on books) have always been published.”

The format raises interesting avenues for individual freelancers. In the future I could see a name-brand writer selling their own features, past columns, etc. in this format.

4. Kickstarter

Former Worldchanging editor Alex Steffen is using Kickstarter to fund his next mini-book, a guide to building a greener city. A quick scan of the Writing and Publishing directory at Kickstarter, the crowdsourced funding platform for projects, show a number of interesting literary and documentary projects.

Got an idea for a 50,000 word profile on an obscure but mind-blowing musician or historical figure? A five-part travelogue across northern Ontario? A crowdsourced, multimedia project about the G20? Consider partnering up and turning to Kickstarter to fund your project. You’ll get the starting cash to cover some of your starting expenses and once you have a completed product, a chance to sell it.

5. The Atavist

There’s been a lot of buzz around this Brooklyn-based micro-publisher. The Atavist publisher longer-form pieces and sells them online on iTunes (in app) and through Kindle. I’ve had a chance to use their app and it’s a lovely way to enhance a story with audio, video and other features. I could talk more about it, but the New York Times’ David Carr beat me to the punch.

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?

1. An internet-first team

You’ve bought yourself an editorial team that only thinks about the internet. They’re not saddled by print schedules and long magazine lead times. They know how to aggregate and curate. They also know how to produce original content for the internet and do so on a regular basis on small budgets. They even have an award to prove it.

Torontoist’s G20 coverage is admirable considering the amount of resources that staff would probably have had. Think of what the team can do for your TIFF or Fashion Week coverage. Torontoist’s staff can also be your eyes and ears on the ground. The site has always been great at ferreting out stories that have a way of getting traction in mainstream media a few days later. You, St. Joseph Media, have exclusive access to that now.

2. Scouts and testers

Let Torontoist be your idea incubator. Need to test out a new online platform? Try it out first on Torontoist with a team that isn’t saddled with the day-to-day duties of putting out a magazine and can think like online-first editors and users. Push its writers and editors play around with online storytelling techniques. The results may not always be polished and perfect but you might learn something that you can use on one of your other magazine sites.

3. Respect the community

I’ve always marveled at how Torontoist was able to tap its community for content, ideas and more. The blog’s annual Heroes and Villains feature is a big debate and traffic driver. The site’s Flickr pool is one of the best repositories of local photography anywhere. Need more proof? I did a quick scan on Twitter and Torontoist has a very respectable 24,000+ followers — that’s more than eye Weekly and Now (TOist rival BlogTO is closing in on 40,000). Respect that community. Keep giving them great content and they’ll keep giving you their time and energy.

One last thing: Buying Torontoist isn’t going to automatically guarantee you a win against your competition. And you’re still going to have to figure out where a scrappy, run-and-gun blog is going to fit into a company full of magazines. May I suggest looking at the relationship between New York Magazine and the Vulture and its other blogs, or the Atlantic and its online properties. But at the end of the day, let Torontoist be Torontoist you might be happy at what you get

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.

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.

Using social networks to tell stories

Millions of us spend a significant amount of time on social networks and journalists have been mining Facebook and other social networks to find sources and research background.

We’ve already seen Tweets and Facebook status messages used the same way as quotes and other personal statements. The Washington Post, last fall, used a woman’s facebook messages as the narrative thread for a moving story on her pregnancy.

In the same bent is a social media curation tool called Storify (Keepstream is another tool) that lets journalists stitch together stories with significant social media components to them. In print, it makes perfect sense to quote tweets and Facebook status messages. Really, there’s no other way to get your point across. But quoting a tweet and not linking out to it (or embedding it) in an online story is kinda silly.

What’s becoming clear is that the journalist can play a key role as curator and annotator of the seemingly endless amount of information out there in our various social networks. I can’t think of a more perfect example of this than Andy Carvin’s tweets throughout the last few months.

Carvin has tirelessly sifted, authenticated and commented on thousands of tweets flooding out of the Middle East and North Africa as revolution gripped the countries in those regions.

Below: A screenshot of Andy Carvin’s Twitter account

Maps and location

One of the more intriguing online stories I’ve seen in recent memory is Open File’s moving Remembrance Day maps of Toronto’s Second World War dead. It was part of Open File’s ambitious Remembrance Day package, the Poppy File. Patrick Cain plotted the homes of almost all of Toronto’s war dead to powerful effect. Many of these maps were also broken up to show deaths by service, or deaths from certain battles during the war. The timeline of the war itself also give us a natural narrative.

An amazing piece of journalism where maps play a key role is Basetrack, the project sees multimedia journalists embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan.

Another interesting tool to tell stories is Intersect, which I got to see in action at last year’s Online News Association conference. The program allows you to place photos, stories and media in the “intersection” of time and place using maps and timelines.

Toronto start-up My City Lives is another intriguing location-based project that drops user-generated videos on real-life locations in Toronto.

Google Maps is already a pretty easy tool to use and with location features becoming more common with smartphones, I expect to see ambitious online outlets play with mapping and location to tell stories.

Below: A part of Open File’s Remembrance Day project, the Poppy File

The game as story

Gamification is one of those buzzwords that’s being thrown around a lot lately. Think of programs like Foursquare that use badges, points and leaderboards to encourage user activity. There are people thinking of how to use gaming mechanics in the news but I want to turn this 90° and ponder whether games themselves can be a way to tell a story.

Could a Canadian newspaper use a game to simulate a federal election? What about a game where you simulate an economic policy? This isn’t necessarily new either, sports fans have been able to join fantasy leagues, pools and tournament brackets for years.

Below: Foursquare badges aren’t news but maybe there are ways to get gaming elements into the news and storytelling?

A few other trends that aren’t going away anytime soon:

Crowdsourcing — Sometimes the best stories come from your readers. Facebook, blogs and twitter have made more people comfortable with sharing stories. As a result it’s much easier to get great content from your readers.

Another intriguing use of your readership, and one that’s actually almost two-years-old now, is the Guardian’s “Investigate Your MP Expenses” project. It asked Guardian readers to sift through the thousands of pages of MP expense reports and flag anything suspicious.

Access to primary documents — Programs like Scribd and Document Cloud make it easy for outlets to share primary documents. The trick is crafting a compelling narrative around it.

Data journalism — Each year that goes by journalist and programmers are getting savvier at using data to tell stories and shed light on issues. Here’s a good round-up of a few intriguing data journalism projects.

A few concluding notes:

New tools and new methods don’t mean that traditional journalistic storytelling isn’t important. The well-crafted, thoroughly researched feature can be more compelling than all the slideshows and maps put together. There’s also the simple fact that in daily news environments there’s little time to work on fancy features when there are real deadlines at your heels.

Nonetheless, it’s important to note that more people are getting their news exclusively online and that devices like iPads and smartphones can make for rich storytelling experiences. With little more than pen and paper journalists have been able to tell some amazing stories, I can’t wait to see what they’ll be able to do with the tools out there now.

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.

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.

The National Post’s new apps have integrated timeshifting features and I explain them here.

For media outlets ‘timeshifting’ of reading is something that they’ll have to cope with as more and more users flock to mobile and tablets for their reading. Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton argued that it was one of the key trends to look out for in 2011.

And if Read It Later’s own data is any indication it’s changing consumption patterns dramatically. Pushing people to read on iPads and smartphones and away from reading longer materials at the computer. It may even change the way some journalists write as this article points out.

How would that change the way we write? Well, first of all, someone would have to figure out (through web analytics hopefully) what the general cutoff point is for making the read-it-later action, i.e. how long does an article have to look for someone to want to save it for later.

There are also questions of monetization. Programs like Instapaper and Read It Later often strip out ads and minimizes layouts. So how do sites make money off people who save their articles to read later? Is it an acceptable cost? Remember that TV execs that decried ‘timeshifting’ and PVRs as theft were pretty much ignored by consumers.

Right now, I think most media outlets see Instapaper and Read It Later as being enablers for consumption of content and not as threats. This might change if large numbers of their readers stop reading articles on their site, where ads can be served and their reading, interaction data, etc. can be tracked.

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.1. The Atlantic

The Atlantic recently announced that it posted a profit for the first time in years. Online growth in revenue and traffic were big parts of its success. There’s also this great New York Times piece about how the Atlantic transformed itself. Some of the things I like about the Atlantic:

The Atlantic Wire: the magazine’s collection of bloggers and short pieces, means that the Atlantic’s readers come back to the site again and again. A magazine is no longer just the hard-copy issue anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time.

Personality: They’ve got a crackerjack blogger in Andrew Sullivan, a whip-smart, tech savvy forward thinking journalist/editor in Alexis Madrigal, a savvy cultural commentator in Ta-Nehisi Coates. Hire smart people and let ‘em run.

2. The Walrus (Note: I’m good friends with many of the people at the Walrus. But I do genuinely think they’re doing great work online)

Many people dub the Walrus the Harper’s of Canada. Thankfully the Walrus hasn’t embraced Harper’s anti-internet ideas. Case in point:

The Walrus on Twitter: It’s funny, it’s interesting and it’s got personality to boot. Where Harper’s Twitter feed is mostly just links to its articles the Walrus gets passionate about things. It also points its followers to articles, videos and other things that they might find interesting.

3. Lapham’s Quarterly

A quarterly journal that explores ideas and history doesn’t seem like a natural fit for the internet but LQ, founded by former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, has extended its brand online effortlessly.

The full-court press: Lapham’s Quarterly is on Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, blogs, even on Tumblr.

LQ understands that as a quarterly it’d be easy for its readers (and potential readers) to forget about the magazine. The solution? Get your “magazine” where your readers are everyday. LQ spreads out its content over weeks and months and creates fresh articles on its blog, Tumblr, Twitter accounts and more. This stuff might not make LQ money directly but having more people know about your publication can only help when you’re advertising for events and subscriptions.

A few other points:

Contrary to MacArthur’s arguments the internet isn’t going away and it’s becoming the most important way that people find out about news and explore ideas. Harper’s publishes great articles. Big, great to read, well-reported, wonderfully written features but I wonder how many of them are being ignored and missed out on because its editors are keeping them behind a paywall? If Harper’s is a magazine of ideas wouldn’t you want these ideas to be shared and discussed?

Finally, there’s the issue of cultural relevance. I’m certain that Harper’s audience, like the audience for a lot of magazines, isn’t getting any younger. Finding new (and younger) subscribers are important to any magazine’s long-term survival. Staying off the internet certainly won’t help.

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.

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.

1. Kill that crappy CMS

Everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) hates their CMS (content management system). The CMS is that cursed thing that you use to get copy/photos/etc. to your website and most of them kinda suck. Why? They’re usually designed with print workflows in mind which are pretty terrible for the Web. In many cases they’re also built by a small team of developers who just don’t have the know-how or resources to put out a decent product. Also, lots of them are proprietary, which means if they break down or you want something developed, you have to rely on the company that built it for you to fix your problem.

So can you replace it with a free product? Maybe. At the Post we’ve been using WordPress. The Post hosts our blogs on WordPress VIP, which isn’t free… but you could very easily install it on your servers for very cheap. For the record, the BFP is hosting their blog and newspaper sites on WordPress.

2. Save on software costs

Lets do a bit of scratchpad math. A software licence for Adobe Photoshop costs about $200. Multiply that by the 100 computers or so in a medium-sized newsroom. Multiply that again by the number of other software products you’ll need (Indesign? Word? Excel?). Those costs add up.

The BFP showed that free and open source software can do the work of expensive software and get decent results. If you’re a small-town paper, a college publication or, more interestingly, a publication in the developed world that doesn’t want to run afoul of software piracy laws, open-source could be an option.

3. Learn how to crowdsource

Maybe more interesting than the software side of the BFP is the reporting experiments. The editors and reporters learned how to get input from their audience, brainstorm story ideas and drive coverage.

Here’s a sampling:

The Saratogian — Saratoga Springs, N.Y. – used social media to help report a story on how local charitable agencies and non-profit were leveraging the power of Facebook to help raise funds.

The Oakland Press utilized a town hall meeting – something that has become a regular occurrence for the Michigan site – to solicit ideas for the Ben Franklin Project. As a result the OP team decided to start a story on textbook bias to see who pens the books used to teach our children.

The Times Herald in Norristown, Penn. utilized the BFP to launch an ongoing series on immigration issues their communities are facing. The edit team continued community impact stories with a report on the power company and rising electric rates, as well as a more light-hearted look at an issue all those in greater Philadelphia care about – the cheesesteak.

4. Think big

The BFP is a perfect example of thinking big about change. We’re not talking about asking staffers to blog more or get on Twitter, Facebook. We’re talking about a major rethink about how 18 newspapers (!!!) report, edit, design and publish their products. You’ll run into difficulties small and large, but if you trust your staff they’ll power through it.

5. Just do it

When trying new things no amount of reading, planning and practice can replace actually doing things. A quick skim of the BFP blog shows that the staff at these papers ran into problems and discovered things in their day-to-day operations. But every problem solved and tip learned is potentially valuable down the road.

6. Leadership buy-in is a must

This project was spearheaded by Journal Register CEO John Paton. Having your boss dive right into the project and leading by example is key. Here’s a publisher who runs his own WordPress blog, is active on Twitter and can actually say “digital first” and mean it.

His address to Journal Register Company employees back in February is heartening and visionary stuff:

I think accountability journalism is threatened in this country as newspapers struggle to find their way to a profitable future. And I think that threatens this country because we provide some of the key checks and balances in our communities. What we do is important and what we do is worth saving. And that means we have to change.

For all of the challenges we face I also believe these are some of the most exciting times to be in the business of local journalism.

New technologies and seismic developments such as social media are, if we are an open and questing company, allowing us to experiment in ways to truly participate with the audience. By opening ourselves up to ideas and partnerships within our communities and those companies that are harnessing technology to both create and distribute information, we can participate with the audience in ways we have never done before. And we can become better providers of local journalism.

7. Don’t stop

Now that the BFP is over the Journal Register Company is keeping the momentum going. The company has created the ideaLab, where their most innovative journalists will be equipped with the latest gear (iPhone, iPad, netbook) and guaranteed 10 hours a week to work on their own projects. The Nieman Lab likes it. I do too.