Interests Begat Quantity and Quality of Information
June 17, 2013
Making the transition from print to web, there is no question that journalism has evolved much over the last several years. Fast Company Labs has looked into another major questions in journalism: do people want short or long articles? The article, ”This is What Happens When Publishers Invest in Long Stories,” sheds some light on longer pieces akin to “slow live blogging.”
These “slow live blogging” articles take a mindful approach that information does note always develop in real time and stories can be built upon over time. These super-long articles start out being posted initially as stub stories.
The article tells us more about the processing for developing a stub story into something more grandiose:
“But when more news breaks, you go back to the article, insert an update at the top, and change the headline and subheadline (known in our business as the “hed” and “dek”) to reflect the update. Our system updates the story “slug” when the headline changes–check the URL of this story, and you’ll see words from the headline in the URL: /this-is-what-happens-when-publishers-invest-in-long-stories. But the number preceding the slug–on this article, it’s 3009577–is a unique node ID which never changes. So essentially, every time we update an article, we get a fresh URL with a fresh headline, but pointing back to the same (newly updated) article. So, it’s like having many URLs and many headlines which lead back to the same big, multi-faceted article. We called these “Tracking” stories.”
The article delves into a longer sub-section on the motivation behind these long stories. As one might guess, quality and depth of information are at the forefront and Fast Company has seen a spike in average visit duration numbers. Short content or length — where there is an interest, there will be an information source.
Megan Feil, June 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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