The Return of Long-form Copy
Tim Denning is doing it. So are Shaunta Grimes, Ayodeji Awosika, Nathaniel O Calloway, and others. Amardeep Parmar recently posted a story that was really a short book — an amazing twenty-six-minute read. Writers who have built their careers writing relatively short articles (three to five minutes read time) are now making the change over to long-form writing. Read time has increased from an average of four minutes to lengths closer to ten minutes. What does this mean for writers? And readers?
Why is long-form becoming more popular?
Print magazine sales have declined since the early 2000s, in part due to the growing popularity of blogs and sites like Buzzfeed. But long-form content, the kind that gets shared on social media, still commands a readership and is compelling to digital publishers.
The New York Times has invested millions of dollars into long-form journalism and has seen its profits increase. For years the most popular length of a story on the magazine’s website has been the ten-minute read, a dramatic increase from the three-minute story seen from 1981 to 2001.
