Hi all -- I'm Long Lead's editor, John Patrick Pullen. Thanks for the compliments (those of you who have) and for those who have other thoughts, we hear you.
I'm personally a big fan of reader-mode on browsers, myself, but at Long Lead, we think there's an opportunity for a new kind of journalism, one that takes time to produce and relies on design as much as it does editorial and art. You can't stuff that in a reader-mode — and really we don't want to.
We're a journalism studio. What's a journalism studio, you ask? Well, what's a film studio? You know -- they produce feature films that look great in the right or best contexts. Watching on a phone isn't as good as a tablet, which isn't as good as a TV or a projector. Similarly, our features journalism is built to scale (we do actually build separate mobile layouts) but isn't designed to leave our site. Also, all of them are bespoke builds made to support the reporting that they're housing, because every feature has its own needs. We work in every medium, too, from podcasts to documentaries to photo features like this one.
We believe there's an opportunity for this kind of journalism, because it used to exist. Remember a time when magazines arrived in your inbox with gorgeous photos and fact-checked features that took months to make? That's what we're doing, but online.
I hope you follow us and our work. We have some exciting stuff ahead. The best way to know when our next feature drops is by subscribing to our newsletter at www.longlead.com/newsletters.
A couple pieces of feedback from someone who loves your content
1. I can't find an RSS feed anywhere?
2. Your homepage (https://longlead.com/#stories) is — and there's no gentle way to put this — borderline unusable. All I want is a simple list of your stories.
With a little bit of "undesigning," you'd have an amazing site :)
1. Being RSS-compatible would unbundle the editorial and art from the design. I wish RSS readers and aggregators would support our builds, but they do not. We do produce newsletters (currently through Substack) that do/would, but those are very different editorial products.
2. I understand this critique. We have outgrown this build, and are looking to develop a new website this year. It was good when we were starting out, but it doesn't serve our readership well anymore -- as you're pointing out!
This was killed by the HN community. I’ve vouched for it. Killing posts you disagree with isn’t the point of the flag feature.
With that being said, I understand your perspective. I’ve grappled with this myself. Please note that having RSS does not mandate that there’s content attached to each entry. It can “just” be a title, date, stable id like your slug, and a link. That way, if you insist on directing visitors to your own site, that can be done, while still allowing the reader to get updates in their reader.
I can assure you that if you add an RSS feed, I will regularly consume your content. If you don’t, I won’t even know it exists. For all the faults of legacy media, attaining readership is not one of them. They’d all remove RSS feeds in an instant if they could without loosing readers.
It's pretty for sure, but it breaks reader view which I use a lot, so I don't like it. also it requires a lot of unnecessary scrolling to read since the text is broken up so much
Works great in firefox on android. Text takes exact screen width and is not too small nor too big, and there are no stupid floating right side icons overlapping the text, what more do you need
It does have an unneeded text-scrolling-up effect, and breaks reader view which means they're doing something sinister, but at least reader view isn't actually necessary in this one for the way it looks
Counterpoint: it's super clear and easy to read on Firefox mobile. No popups or interstitial ads. Yes it's quite lengthy and there are many pictures, but you know what you're getting into with any long article like this one. This is exactly what I want for reading on mobile.
Hi all -- I'm Long Lead's editor, John Patrick Pullen. Thanks for the compliments (those of you who have) and for those who have other thoughts, we hear you.
I'm personally a big fan of reader-mode on browsers, myself, but at Long Lead, we think there's an opportunity for a new kind of journalism, one that takes time to produce and relies on design as much as it does editorial and art. You can't stuff that in a reader-mode — and really we don't want to.
We're a journalism studio. What's a journalism studio, you ask? Well, what's a film studio? You know -- they produce feature films that look great in the right or best contexts. Watching on a phone isn't as good as a tablet, which isn't as good as a TV or a projector. Similarly, our features journalism is built to scale (we do actually build separate mobile layouts) but isn't designed to leave our site. Also, all of them are bespoke builds made to support the reporting that they're housing, because every feature has its own needs. We work in every medium, too, from podcasts to documentaries to photo features like this one.
We believe there's an opportunity for this kind of journalism, because it used to exist. Remember a time when magazines arrived in your inbox with gorgeous photos and fact-checked features that took months to make? That's what we're doing, but online.
I hope you follow us and our work. We have some exciting stuff ahead. The best way to know when our next feature drops is by subscribing to our newsletter at www.longlead.com/newsletters.
