We often turn to long-form articles to escape from the endless headline scrolling. This piece is a reminder that the length of a piece alone isn’t an indicator of quality, and that unlimited web publishing still has some things to learn about the art of constraint.
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I enjoyed this. I think Bennet makes some great points. I wonder if his suggestion has picked up any traction since this came out 7 years ago. I don’t particularly think “magazine writing” is a great phrase for it since magazines seem to be a dying breed. But I don’t have any better suggestions either.
Quality journalism and long-form seem to have died off together, or were they killed off by social media platforms monopolizing all our precious in-between times of life by burying flecks of gold so deep in our feeds?
On the flip side, us readers should have predicted that these digital editor algorithms have built-in disdain for human flourishing and we should have pledged to simulate a “magazine reading” browsing style i.e. limit ourselves to a certain number of headlines parsed, per quality articles read, per day. So if the quality drops, the interaction stops, like an exploitation stop-gap. Instead we let the algorithms alter us.
