David Wolf (Editor: The Guardian Long Read)

THE JOY OF READING

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Newspapers are in trouble and that’s not news to you. Print is expensive, the ads moved to Facebook and Google, the classifieds bled over to Craigslist. You know all this.

So, hats off to the newspapers that succeed today. And the ones that do, the big ones, the legacy media, have a surprising thing in common: magazines. The New York Times. The Times of London. Le Monde. Germany. Italy. All over Asia. A lot of them produce print magazines as editorial add ons, supplements, not just for reader loyalty and engagement, but as a way to expand inventory for advertisers and a way to diversify business and the brand.

That’s what The Guardian newspaper is doing and, being The Guardian, they are also doing it differently than their competitive set. How? By taking an existing feature of the newspaper, The Long Read, and reproducing their favorites in a stand alone magazine. A kind of greatest hits package if you will. Well designed. Very printy. Heavy stock. Debossed covers.

So why do it? Who benefits? What is the business rationale behind it? To answer those questions, I spoke to David Wolf, the editor of The Long Read, the section and the magazine, about these topics and, mostly, about the joys of immersive storytelling, the state of journalism today, and the absolute joy of long reads in a world of shortened attention spans and general slop.

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Freeport Press.

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