Don’t read this in the office: 5 great pieces of long-form journalism

In the early days, the Internet was for reading and writing. Images took forever to load, and the nature of HTML meant accuracy was a necessity for putting anything online. As a result, the words on the web were often rather well written. Even the flame wars were in properly punctuated sentences.

Things changed: ecommerce brought people online to shop; YouTube gave the goggle-eyed TV-viewing masses to Google; finally, social networks made it easy for everyone to spew their most trivial thoughts into the cloud. Over time, search engine optimisation and the exigencies of linkbait culture have driven ‘style’ to the digital margins, a minor consideration against the all-important secret sauce of killer content and a great keyword-packed headline.

Here, then, are a few choice delicacies for anyone out there who still loves the baroque, the discursive and the prolix. Make yourself comfortable (and don’t click these links if your lunchbreak ends in 5 minutes):

1. In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson
   Magnificently bullish 1999 description of the operating system wars
2. Dangerous Minds, by Malcolm Gladwell
   From the New Yorker, the spiritual home of long-form journalism, a perfect twisty-turny Malcolm Gladwell analysis
3. The Women’s Crusade, by Sheryl WuDunn
   Is there any major UK newspaper or website that would publish and promote a 7-page argument for the role women’s rights play in international development?
4. The Great American Bubble Machine, by Matt Taibbi
   “[Goldman Sachs is] a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Wow. Just wow.
5. Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds, by Michael Lewis
   The Liar’s Poker author has written an absolutely jaw-dropping dissection of the Greek financial crisis.

Know any great content that takes more than 10 minutes to read? Give me a few links in the comments below:

How Google killed the shortcut

Putting a web address on your print campaigns no longer works.

A couple of weeks ago, we put a shortcut URL on a letter we were sending to a few supporters about a project in Uganda: “www.actionaid.org.uk/giriki” is what we printed at the bottom of the page. We included the ‘www’  because we knew that this group weren’t particularly digitally savvy, and would understand it better if they had the World Wide Web prefix. 40% of them typed it into their address bar, and ended up in the right place.

But 60% of them did this:

And because we’d used a 301 redirect to a newly published page for SEO reasons too boring to explain, they ended up with a search that had the wrong page as the top result.

People no longer know what the address bar is for

For anyone who came to the internet after about 2006, the Google widget in your browser is what you use to navigate the web. The address bar is just a weird set of letters and punctuation that changes every time you hit a link.

Those late adopters now represent a huge proportion of Internet users: last month alone, Google saw 226,000,000 searches for ‘gmail’. And this is what Google predicts if you put ‘www.’ into a search:

If you want your audience to go from print or display advertising to your website, you need to tell them what to search for on Google, not what to type in the address bar.

And Google’s grip on the web gets a little bit tighter…

What’s your favourite word?

In David Lodge’s effervescent farce Small World, the unspeakable Robin Dempsey gives northern author Ronald Frobisher a computerised analysis of his style.

The angry young novelist’s favourite adjectives, it turns out, are ‘grease’, ‘grime’ and ‘grey’; direct speech for male characters is signalled by a blunt ‘he said’, while women gasp, sigh, whisper urgently, or cry passionately; his female leads have biblical names beginning with the letter ‘R’; and so on. Crippled by this awareness of his own style, Frobisher endures six miserable years of writer’s block.

Small World was written in 1984. I dread to think what would happen to the poor bloke if he had the tools currently available.

Check out, for example, the terrifying Analyze Words, which takes your Twitter feed and tells you how cheery you are.

Might as well just change my handle to @miserableoldman.

There are the ever-present Wordles, which everyone seems to think are just the cutest thing. Except that if you actually wrote most of the copy for the website…

…you find yourself sitting there going ‘Underway? But that’s a horrible word. I can’t possibly be using it that much.” Then you look and you realise that it’s all over the internet, everywhere you’ve ever typed into a CMS.

Hold your nose: it's the Daily Mail's disgusting keyword strategy

In my last job, we had a search engine specialist who would send me lists of keywords to include in titles and URLs of web pages I was writing. I’d put them on Post-It notes,  and stick them to my computer, and the computers of bloggers I edited, as a clear reminder of what we needed to shoehorn into our copy.

I don’t know what the Post-It notes in the Daily Mail office look like, but here is a little taste (bolded in the link) of their keyword strategy:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1277769/Fury-job-centre-advertises-phone-sex-workers-willing-pose-naked-webcam.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1280783/Lessons-rape-porn-pupils-aged-11.html

The ability to conjure a perfect headline out of mundane events has always been one of the most entertaining and impressive feats of good tabloid journalism.

But there is surely a difference between the art of catching the eye of the passer-by with some bold block capitals and a daft pun, and building a keyword strategy around people who might be typing into google ‘rape porn pupils aged 11′

Can we really say there is a moral element to something as mundane and analytics-focussed as a keyword strategy? Well, it’s not hard to imagine how the Daily Mail might spin the story if they discovered that a rival paper was chasing the kind of readers who might stumble across this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1198485/Rape-abortion-incest-Is-CHILDREN-read.html