06th Apr 2014 by Samantha Walker

10 Yetis Insight Blog - Is BuzzFeed going to be the saviour of long form journalism?

We're surrounded on a daily basis with micro journalism; newspapers tend to favour shorter articles in order to fit more into their pages, blogs have been written to be short and sweet in order to capture attention, and the likes of Twitter forces us to compact what we want to say in just 140 characters. 

Over the past few years it may have seemed that long form journalism has been slowly but surely dying out. Whilst i believe this has been largely over exaggerated, long form journalism is once again becoming a growing trend. Many of you may not know this, but a little over a year ago BuzzFeed introduced long form journalism under the name 'BuzzReads' - they did this for those who were 'scared' of their traditional pieces that consisted of just images, gifs, videos and quizzes.

Before writing this, I was asked if I thought BuzzFeed was going to be the saviour of long form journalism... and whilst I do think it contributes, it's not going to be the saviour. BuzzFeed UK has roughly 16 million monthly users, this equates to roughly 10% of BuzzFeed's overall global traffic, but how many of these users interact with the site for long form articles in comparison to the viral pieces that are image-led? My thoughts; not that many.

BuzzFeed aren't the only ones branching out into long form journalism; for example, there are dedicated Twitter accounts and hashtags, such as @LongRead and #longform, and in 2012 Google began promoting high-quality long form pieces over aggregated content.

I recently read a 2011 interview with Gerry Marzorati, former editor of The New York Times Magazine, and he stated that the most read and shared articles within the magazine were in fact the long form articles and stories. However, he then went on to state that even though this disproves the idea that long form journalism is dying out, there is in fact a decrease in the number of publishers and outlets willing to use these stories. Marzorati believes that this is largely due to magazines and newspapers simply not having the funds to send their journalists out to cover stories that could take months of research, and similarly they aren't as interested in publishing long form stories.

However, those that do choose to publish long form stories tend to find that the majority of these stories are read via tablets, such as an iPad or Kindle.

Many people don't like to read large chunks of text sat at a computer or laptop, and a mobile phone simply doesn't make this an easy task. However, the tablet is ideal for this exact purpose.

I think that if anything is going to be the saviour of long form journalism, it's quite possibly going to be tablets.


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