Long-form content was, for a while, the web’s must-have digital accessory. The hype has moved on, but the best examples of long-form still do something special. They engage people in immersive, in-depth content that breaks out of hackneyed blog post formats. Long-form isn’t just about length, it’s refreshingly different to the standard website experience.
An ecosystem of tools and platforms grew up around the format. Shorthand, Pageflow and Exposure are still going strong; others, like the Atavist platform, have fallen by the wayside (though The Atavist Magazine lives happily on). They offer a way to publish content that emphasises good typography and photography, that is enriched with visualisations, video and audio and that rewards exploration: instead of reading a linear article, users often have options for choosing their own journey.
Adaptable content, that works across different channels and devices, has been long needed. Good long-form does this really well, with detachable elements that work discretely on social media as well as an integral part of the flow.
Long-form also brought a welcome decluttering: removing or hiding sidebars, complex navigation and other website furniture in order to let the content take centre stage. Cleaner, minimalistic, essentialist designs and larger fonts improve the user experience. The inescapable logic still holds: if people are switching on their browser’s reader mode to get a cleaner, more readable version of your content, you should be giving them that format natively.
Long-form done well feels like the promise of the multimedia DVD-Rom finally grown up and injected with steroids.
Opening the sluice gate
The web is brimful of reports that nobody reads. With time and a more digital-first approach, Many of these could be turned into excellent long-form content that would reach and engage more people.
Annual reports are the classic case: months of work and carefully gathered evidence, sealed in a PDF that sinks to the bottom of a downloads folder and can only be squinted at on a phone screen. There are better ways. The National Trust now publishes its annual report as a navigable web experience, and Adidas turns its annual report into a polished interactive site, scrollytelling and all. The Regenagri impact report, which we designed and built, turns a year of farming data and partner stories into an immersive, engaging experience that doesn’t have to be read in a linear way. No downloads, no print-ready margins: content that can be linked to, shared and kept alive.
Show me one office that doesn’t use a stack of reports to prop up an old computer screen somewhere, gathering dust, and I’ll show you Nigel Farage participating constructively in a European fisheries meeting.
Deborah Doane, the Guardian
But long-form is not in and of itself an answer to creating engaging content. Nor is it an excuse to pile thousands of unnecessary words into a web page, nor a reason to create a native web version of a long-winded PDF.
Investment into quality content is always welcome and some of the best examples of long-form cost tens of thousands of pounds to put together. But not all long-form content needs to be quite so expensive.
Inadvisable investments
Some of the tools for creating long-form content are excellent, but paying for third-party tools is only necessary because of the poor state of many organisations’ native content creation options. External dependencies on proprietary platforms leave organisations open to future problems and content can get lost on URLs that sit outside the organisational system.
Instead of investing in tools for one-off or occasional use, most would be better off investing in their ability to create such content using their own content systems.
Stop talking about long-form, start talking about good content
Long-form has taught us a lot: that “people don’t read online” is a myth, that investing in sophisticated digital content can bring rich rewards, that people don’t much like cluttered website designs.
All these lessons should apply to all content, irrespective of length. Pieces of string come in various lengths and so should content.
The content elements and techniques that work so well in long-form content work just as well in shorter articles. Digital gives us extraordinary options for creating really engaging content of all lengths. But length shouldn’t be determined by format or vice versa.
AI has made fast content all but free, and the web is flooding with it. That makes the lessons of long-form more valuable, not less: craft, depth and immersion are how you stand out in a sea of slop. It’s the thinking behind slow content, and behind the content products and experiences we build.
We should stop thinking about long-form as a separate thing and invest in great content of all lengths.
