While the resurgence of longform journalism as a Thing People Talk About has been rolling in earnest for the last couple of years, it seemed to reach new heights in 2012, with more apps, more sites, more resources, and more conversation dedicated to longform journalism and writing.
But what are people actually consuming from this supposedly reinvigorated machinery of authorship, churning out products that contain no fewer 2,000 words? The most-saved and most-clicked lists from Pocket — an app that lets you save articles to read later, and affiliated with Longreads — and Longform — a site that curates longform nonfiction, and has an app powered by Readability — spell it out precisely.
Pocket's Most-Saved Stories
1. “Obama’s Way” (Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair)
2. “The ‘Busy’ Trap” (Tim Kreider, The New York Times)
3. “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking” (Mat Honan, Wired)
4. “I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here's How” (Gabriel Wyner, Lifehacker)
5. “How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet” (Mat Honan, Gizmodo)
7. “Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS” (Chris Ziegler, The Verge)
8. “Microsoft’’s Lost Decade” (Kurt Eichenwald, Vanity Fair)
9. “Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’’t Protect Us Anymore” (Mat Honan, Wired)
Longform's Most-Clicked Stories
2. Genius: The Nickelback Story (Ben Paynter, BusinessWeek)
3. What Katie Didn't Know (Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair)
4. The Internet's Best Terrible Person Goes to Jail (Adrian Chen, Gawker)
5. The Truck Stop Killer (Vanessa Veselka, GQ)
6. Will You Still Medal in the Morning? (Sam Alipour, ESPN The Magazine)
7. Obama's Way (Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair)
8. Bath Salts: Deep in the Heart of America's New Drug Nightmare (Natasha Vargas-Cooper, Spin)
9. In Plain View (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker)
10. The Innocent Man (Part 1) (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly)
Pocket's most-saved pieces are dominated by tech stories (and in particular, Mat Honan); I suspect because it's the best free read-later app on Android, and a read-later app + Android = a heavy nerd contingent, and these are the kinds of things they'd save.
Longform's featured pieces are chosen by editors looking to cover a wide swath of genres, and its readers are a more diverse crowd than the kind of people who'd necessarily have or use a read-later application, so the things they click on the most vary topically. (Though obviously cam girls, Nickelback hatred, and the Internet's best terrible person are all topics that would fall squarely in line with what an Internet-native audience would want to read. And sex still sells, given the top story.)
I wonder, though, if things about the Internet and things that the stereotypical "Internet crowd" like are going to so thoroughly blanket these lists next year. I sort of hope not; it would speak better of the future of longform on the Internet.