Nieman Journalism Lab’s Megan Garber has a good post up about Slate and its dedication to long-form journalism, a dying art in the world of blogs and aggregators and online news consumption analysis.
Slate editor David Plotz launched the Fresca Initiative last year, designed to give reporters the opportunity to produce long-form work on subjects of their choice. Under the scheme, staff can take four to six weeks off their normal jobs to produce more in-depth stuff.
The result? Not only a handful of very good (and, at as many as tens of thousands of words, very long) articles but serious traffic to the site too. For the tens of thousands of words there have been millions of page views.
For Plotz, the form is about “building the brand of Slate as a place you go for excellent journalism”. It is not about “building Slate into a magazine that has 100 million readers,” but making sure they have “two million or five million or eight million of the right readers”.
Anybody trying to monetise online content at the moment knows about the right readers, and about their value to advertisers.
So here’s to the idea that ten thousand word articles and are not anathema to online audiences, and to the idea that giving your staff six weeks off to write them isn’t anathema to making money from online content.
And, most of all, here’s to the idea that my boss thinks so too.
But I’m not holding my breath.
I enjoyed her article, and I think that Slate makes a compelling, albeit an elitist, claim. There’s a place for long-form journalism. If some of the readers here teach media studies, you may be interested in an assignment I developed around this article. Here’s the link, http://bit.ly/bes1Am