Encourage attention to long reads with technology

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on August 20, 2010 at 9:02 AM

With Twitter and Facebook now indispensable features of journalism, it is quite difficult to envisage readers paying attention to articles of any substantial length. Mallary Tenore on PoynterOnline writes about how Nate Weiner (Read It Later), Marco Arment (Instapaper), Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer (Longform.org), and Mark Armstrong (@LongReads) have "found ways to use Web tools to renew attention to long-form journalism, increase its shelf life and make it easier for people to consume and share it."

Read It Later, is a tool "that enables people to save stories from their computer, smart phone or iPad, and makes them available for offline use." The tool saves an entire article page and makes it available even when offline, to reduce distractions, pages can be saved as text-only. This way, an article can be revisited at a more convenient time, without risking its disappearance on a busy news website.

For more on this story, visit our sister publication, editorsweblog.org.