How often have you heard the claim that "nobody reads long content on the web?" An even more important question is: how often have you followed that advice to make your content short and catchy, no matter how that twisted and tortured the content became in the process?
The ultimate exercise in brevity of course is Twitter, which attempts enable your communication about life, exhortation, and inspiration to be condensed to 140 characters. This isn't a critique of that attempt. You can say a lot in 140 characters—John 3:16 is only 129.
But people can't live on short, catchy summaries alone and even Twitter often links to longer content. Recognizing this need for more information, one of the founders of Twitter (and Blogger), Ev Williams, has recently become involved in a new long-form journalism project on the web. As part of explaining his reasons for doing this, he said:
We love tweets as much as the next person (probably more), but sometimes we long for something meatier. Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless, how do we increase the depth of understanding, while also creating a level playing field that encourages great ideas coming from anywhere? http://mashable.com/2013/05/28/medium-ev-williams/
Aaron Gell, the new editor of the long-form division for the publication Business Insider, describes his motivation for long-form journalism in this way:
"The Internet has brought us a deluge of information — who, what, when — but if you really want to enhance people's understanding, there's no substitute for a powerful narrative that carries a reader along, teases out the subtleties of a story and hopefully gets at a larger truth." http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/rieder/2013/11/06/business-insider-makes-a-foray-into-long-form-journalism/3453405/
New devices support the need for long-form content
Tablets, iPad, Kindles, and smart phones have drastically changed how we consume content and many attribute the growing popularity of long-form content in part to these devices, as these recent studies suggest:
Data from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism reinforce the notion that lots of people like to read in-depth journalism on mobile devices. In a study called "Future of Mobile News" last October, Pew found that 73% of tablet owners access long-form content either regularly or sometimes; 19% do so each day. The same overall total was true for phones, with 11% regular consumers
Those readers have healthy appetites. About 60% of the tablet users who access long-form read two to three articles in a sitting, and another 17% read four or more. Often, the report found, they devour articles that they hadn't initially planned to read.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2013/06/05/rem-rieder-longform/2389995/
There isn't anything inherently magical about the technology of a tablet computer or smart phone that makes people read more long-form content on them. A big part of the appeal it is that the content is simply so much easier to read because the physical size of these devices shortens line length and the ability to make the text larger makes the content more readable. In addition, these devices are easy to carry around and read enabling otherwise wasted wait time productive.
The implications of this trend for church communications
There are two major areas of important implications for church communicators with this trend towards long-form journalism—content creation and information design. These two areas are intertwined and it's essential to understand both for effective long-form journalism.
Quality content creation is essential because though people might be in a hurry, they still have empty hearts, nagging questions about the faith, and difficulties in application. You can pastor or teach through blogs and online articles that don't have to be constrained to short, snappy lists, catchy descriptions and summaries. But to do that, you also can't simply dump content into your website with the attitude of "people will read longer material now."
The importance of Information Design
You also have to look at Information Design, which is what makes the content readable. I realized after drafting this blog that it was essential to show you what I'm talking about. As the video link below will show you, what was important in print in the past is important again: line-length, hierarchies of type face, size and style are once again understood as essential for long-form material to be readable. In the past many sites simply dumped in long form content (past writings from church history, etc.) but only the most dedicated teachers would slog through them.
In response, most people ignored this content. What the secular sites show us is that you can take longer, meaningful content and with changes in Information Design, make it accessible.
The process to take difficult to read material and make it more readable is challenging. I will be working on some systems to make it easier for churches offices to implement. There are a number of levels that Information Design can be applied and many of them go back to the basics of typography. I'm excited to explore that because I've always loved teaching about and designing with type in print.
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Here is the link to the video that : https://www.effectivechurchcom.com/video-introduction-for-long-form-content-and-the-information-design-needed-to-make-it-readable/
It's an exciting time to be a church communicator as we all learn more effective ways to communicate "the whole counsel of God" with the tools of long-form journalism.
