Greeny News

With the help of Twitter and sites such as Long Form and The Awl, longer articles are finding a new lease of life as people take the time to find and read them

Everybody's got it in for the web this summer. It's getting the blame for everything from destroying our businesses to destroying our brains. Rupert Murdoch is still trying to see if newspapers such as the Times can leave the open web behind, while Nick Carr's latest polemic, The Shallows, argues that online culture is eroding our capacity to think properly. Even Wired â€" the magazine that championed the rise of the dotcom world â€" is putting the boot in: its latest cover story is an incendiary piece co-authored by its editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, arguing that "the web is dead".

A few new experiments in recent weeks, including one of my own, are designed to find out whether the tools usually labelled as distractions can actually help find remarkable journalism.

I went to Twitter, and set up an account: @IfYouOnly. The motto was short and sweet ("if you only read one thing today, make it this") and the premise was straightforward: to highlight and link to a single piece of gripping, powerful and memorable writing each weekday. The project is still very much in the early stages, but so far we've linked to stories about Japanese hermits, Colombian assassins and Californian ghost towns. A handful of new followers sign up every day, and other people have sent in suggestions of good stories to link to. Most of the material lives on magazine sites (such as the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Esquire), newspaper sites (New York Times, Los Angeles Times) or web-only outfits (KeepGoing).

The project is in its infancy but one thing I've already found out is that there is a growing community of people dedicated to spreading good writing using the very technologies that people say is killing long-form journalism.

"Our site has gotten far more attention than we possibly imagined it would," says Aaron Lammer, co-creator of longform.org, which promises to give its users links to articles that are "too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser".

Each day the New York-based book editor and his partner, Max Linsky, select a handful of pieces and pass them through a service called Instapaperthat makes them easy to print or read on devices such as telephones, melt or iPad.

\\ "The enthusiasm has been registered by writers, publishers, publications, and journalistic centers," Lammer said. "This is a reply sa 'on a very specific point, we again' that is determined by technology and the way the stories were published."

Other services are also springing up to help people find routes to great stories. Among them is givemesomethingtoread.com (also linked to Instapaper) and a Twitter account, @longreads, Which boasts more than 5000 followers. It turns out that, like me, eager readers trying to scratch his itch.

"I know that, personally, it's reintroduced me to truly great magazine-length storytelling â€" from traditional media like the New Yorker and Esquire to newer sites like The Awl ," says Mark Armstrong, the creator of Long Reads, who works for an internet finance startup by day.

"I never used to read longer stories online because I was usually at work when I was browsing the web, or I just felt uncomfortable reading while hunched over a keyboard."

The idea of pointing audiences towards interesting material is far from a new thing. Print outlets have been syndicating articles for almost as long as they've existed, while specialist magazines such as the Week emerged in the mid 1990s to collate and distribute journalism. Then, of course, there's the venerable Reader's Digest â€" nearly a century old â€" which promised to bring its audiences the best writing, even if it took a hatchet to most of it along the way.

The web itself has a well-developed culture of sharing, with some early bloggers such as Jason Kottke and the team at BoingBoing forging careers out of their practice of sharing must-read links about a wide variety of subjects. More complex sites such as Fark, Slashdot and Reddithave a great community, dedicated to sharing news and dissecting each other.

The nature of discovery and consumption may be changing, however, as the desire to read spreads to new devices and the ability to share comes through new services. Amazon says that Kindle editions of books are now outselling hardbacks, which, even when taken with the requisite pinch of salt, indicates a major shift in consumption. Apple has gone so far as to build a "reader" function â€" one that strips out adverts from web pages and reworks them into a distraction-free format â€" into its latest web browser.

The most important element may be that reading, ultimately, human activity. Where is Google News, described the boss after Wall Street Journal ', Robert Thompson, as "parasites" , offers publishers little more than robotic scraping, recommendations from real people are reworking the relationship between technologies and publishers.

"We're experiencing a moment in which the humans are regaining some control over what gets filtered around the web," says Armstrong. "Twitter and Facebook are critical to driving traffic for publishers, and people like to share stories that are thoughtful or unique. These stories are a bit more evergreen than breaking news â€" they live longer lives and get passed around."

Whether you call it editing, PKN, or simply exchange, the publishers would do well to capitalize on the potential boom for a long read. So if technology changes or not, but our main motives remain the same, said Lammer.