Some articles should be short. Some articles should be long. No articles, as Vox and its SB Nation demonstrated, should be longform. Greg Howard’s postmortem of SB Nation’s “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?” debacle offers lots of insights into how a story can go wrong, but the most concise may be his reporting that a…
You are a writer. You write features. You are supposed to write a feature about a very famous person at a major sporting event, but the event has not started yet, so you have no new reporting or novel insights on the subject. No one does, and no one can. This is a difficulty, perhaps even a metaphysical difficulty; if…
Philip Gourevitch took to the New Yorker blog yesterday to publish some words about the Germanwings crash. The resulting blog post is very bad—so bad it is worth taking as a case study in how not to do aggregation.
Are you a writer? Do you admire the writing of Joan Didion? Do you want to express this admiration? Here's a good way to do it: Read some Didion to yourself, and then go out and write a good essay about something, in a voice that sounds like you and reflects your era.
How would you describe the New York City Marathon, an endurance footrace of 26.2 miles? If you would call it a "glorious cross-city sprint," you might have a future at the New York Times sports desk.
The New Yorker, a magazine, has just opened its Internet "archives" (dating back to 2007) as a readers' jubilee in advance of its upcoming move to the world of paywalled journalism, three months hence. So much New Yorker to muck around in! So many words! So many stories! So many stories with so many words in them!
Today's Doge-decorated Jonathan Mahler New York Times op-ed declaration of war against thoughtless #longform writering culture rubbed some readers the wrong way. An internet commenter named "Rick Moody," of "Brooklyn," has offered a counter-denunciation of "the vapidity of short form."
