ABSTRACT
With mobile users now spending twice as much engaged time with longform articles compared with shortform, skyrocketing social media use has escalated interest in highly sharable digital narratives, as the majority of longform readers arrive at their stories from Facebook and Twitter. Through a rising number of aggregators such as Longreads.com and Longform.org, tablet and expanded smartphone users now flock to online-only platforms specializing in narrative nonfiction such as Byliner, The Big Roundtable, The Atavist Magazine, and Epic Magazine. Legacy media including the Washington Post, TBrand Studio, and WSJ Custom Studios (the respective content marketing producers for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal) have redoubled their efforts to out-Snowfall “Snow Fall,” the feature that revolutionized multimedia digital design. Technical innovations have encouraged bold investments from industry to capitalize on unprecedented mobile reader engagement, a movement that has ushered in the current golden age of digital literary journalism, which Robert Boynton has heralded “the supreme nonfiction.”
