[ed. Hey Duck Soup readers, congratulate yourselves on being in the vanguard of new age journalism (which is really old age journalism, but who cares? ha ha...). The thing is, stimulating a reader's interest takes a lot more than just finding longer articles, and hopefully this site captures that dynamic better than most. Thanks for your support.]
Then what is a talented young New York Times reporter doing founding a website devoted to in-depth local reporting?
News aggregators, 24/7 news cycles, 140-character Tweets and attention-span-challenged web users have transformed much of the US media into the journalistic equivalent of McDonalds: quickly produced, easily consumed.
Times freelancer Noah Rosenberg says his "Narratively" website, which he hopes to launch next month, will be more like a long-simmering stew.
"There's been a push against the 24/7 bubble, the echo chamber," Rosenberg said at a Brooklyn cafe that sometimes doubles as his start-up's office. "We're really slowing things down."
Narratively's stable of about 30 young New York journalism high-fliers will ignore breaking news for original, behind-the-scenes material that takes a long time to report and -- at 5,000 words -- a good while to read.
There'll be no breaking news, Rosenberg said, but stories "you can dust off in one year, two, three years down the road and they'll still have some meaning."
When the popular BuzzFeed homepage carries of slideshows like "Cutest Pictures Of Cats And Babies," Yahoo.com's "Trending Now" is mostly showbiz, and big media organizations chase in herds after the same news, Narratively's ambitions might seem quixotic.
But Rosenberg is part of a surprising revival in which sites like Atavist.com and Byliner.com, both founded last year, and Longform.org, founded in 2010, are finding new ways to turn high-quality, lengthy non-fiction into a business.
"We're really tapping into this energy out there," the 29-year-old said.
-- Old-fashioned journalism done in new ways --
by Yahoo Finance | Read more:
