Interest, effects, agency. These are three ways that a story might intersect with you, and they are reasons you might need to see it.
Great article from Jonathan Stray. I’d pay for a news organization that approached its product from these three principles.
What is a Public Editor? I’m curious which news organization will be the first to implement this because eventually one will.
My Gettysburg oration: A vision for journalism that can long endure:
But let’s be honest: Most of the content we publish isn’t stories. It’s news. It’s facts. It’s information. Let’s respect the pure, traditional story – the narrative string of paragraphs – by reserving that form for real stories that have story elements such as plot, character, setting and theme.
This whole speech is phenomenal.
The problem with Jonah Lehrer, like the problem with Zach Kouwe, is not that he was humbled by the insatiable demands of Blog. Instead, it’s that he made a category error, and tried to use a regular blog as a vehicle for the kind of… Continue reading →
As the online editor, I sometimes feel like my job is to make something beautiful, just to hack it apart for kindling. Here’s the way I (mostly) think about it instead: any link to a fragment of LQ is a breadcrumb that can bring you back to the whole. Every magazine wants to lead you back to the mothership, but when you finally pick up an issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, what you have isn’t the end of your own curation and the beginning of our vision. It’s the start of a new reading in a closed-off sphere that also resembles the web you came from: a rabbit hole of thought that you’ll gladly fall into.
Michelle Legro — History and Its Contents.
If digital covers as we know them are so ‘dead,’ why do we hold them so gingerly? Treat them like print covers? We can’t hurt them. They’re dead. So let’s start hacking. Pull them apart, cut them into bits and see what we come up with.… Continue reading →
We need to reinvent the article. Sean Blanda illustrates that it’s time to rethink not just the article but how information is published on the web. I agree. My favorite narratives are those that answer long, winding questions by telling a story. They are more akin to a short book than a news story. This recent New Yorker piece is 50 pages and over 20,000 words when I drop it in to Pages.app. I loved that article, but defaulting to the same mental model and design presentation for a few hundred word piece about NFL draft trades is ludicrous.
There’s a big bug in our news system. We like to say it’s a 24-hour news cycle. And maybe it is, but there’s real news, stuff that effects our lives, that happens over a much longer span of time. Boring or not, we have to… Continue reading →
Deploy. An essay by Mandy Brown that asks how we can more effectively create living texts.