User:Leonieke van Dipten/sandbox

Longform is a term used to describe online articles with a large amount of content and which can take a narrative, journalistic or critical form, also see narrative journalism and long-form journalism. Longform has gained popularity on the web over the last view years, but it is not a new genre of writing per se. Mark Horowitz, senior editor of Matter argues that longform is just a new term for online feature stories. Longform articles can be both journalistic and critical, and exist in between art and science. The form shares similarities with Adorno’s description of the essay in 1958. Adorno argued that “the essay does not obey the rules of the organized sciences and theory, in which, according to Spinoza, the order of things must be equal to the order of ideas.” He saw the essay as a pure linguistic form that cannot be translated into another medium. The essay form is fragmentary, digressive and does not attempt to establish an absolute truth but rather attempts to critically engage with accepted truths.

Definition
Longform has been given various definitions from commentators which emphasis in depth content, journalistic methods and enriched content. David Remnick defines longform as “lengthy, relaxed, deeply-reported, literary nonfiction.” The Australian journalist professor, Matthew Rickertson defines longform as “where practitioners use journalistic methods to research and write independently about contemporary people, events and issues at book length in a timely manner for a broad audience.” Longform has been critiqued as a "mere "buzzword" that allows digital outlets to go “long” rather than produce rigorously researched content that necessitates protracted treatment.” David Dowling and Travis Voga argue that the emerging longform genre “represent how formerly separate storytelling media can be combined into new ways of providing information and an important iteration of convergence in journalism.” These longreads are often enriched with multimedia content such as photography, video, timelines,biographies, audiobooks, interviews, infographics, maps, etc. They often make innovative use of HTML5 and aim to the give reader a totally immersive and sometimes even interactive experience.

Snowfall
The New York Times’ Snow Fall became one of the most high profile longforms, going viral in 2012 and winning the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Snowfall uses a multimedia features such as silent videos, scrolling mechanisms and ‘curtain’ effects. An earlier example of longform or multimedia narrative is the Philadelphia Inquirer Black Hawk Down published in 1997. It was originally published in a 29 part serial and audiovisual series on the Inquirer's website.

Longform Platforms
A growing number of blogging platforms such as Medium, Matter, Istoires, the-magazine, longreads, longform.org, Mediastorm, Atavist have helped popularize longform content online. They present these services as tools for freelance journalist to bypass the traditional media outlets. A growing number of wordpress plugins are under development which are targeted at producers of longform content.

Aesthetics & User design
Longform currently has it’s own aesthetic; a minimal, clean design approach, often featuring large header images, and even some looped videos, with display titles at the start of each article. Parallax is commonly used to create a scrolling, visual illusion of depth to a story; images and media are central to the layout. Typography is also a notable feature of Longforms, as web standards improve - more creative uses of type will continue to be seen. Already Typekit and GoogleFonts can be seen implemented on many sites, replacing the traditional limited choices of typefaces like Arial, Georgia & Verdana. The white margins are often very spacious and the body text centred. Also the font size is often bigger than normal webpages 18px (normal is 16px).

Although Longforms do feature texts over 600 words, the structure of the stories still follow common web reading principles of keeping to short paragraphs, and breaking long sections of text up with pull quotes, images, timelines, audio clips and other media.