Where to find your next long read

By Maria Davison

Creative Commons photo from Flickr user Sean Winters

It's the middle of summer, and while on a break from the normal chaos of the semester, I promised myself I would invest some time in reading great long-form journalism. I have a habit of finding stories I want to read, keeping them open in a tab on my laptop, then forgetting about them, and never actually reading them. 

It's a terrible habit, especially because this kind of journalism provides insight to the hundreds of tweets we read every day. The Internet makes it so easy to know what's happening in the world and long form shows us what news means for the people involved.


Long-form journalism has become trendy, sparking debates like these about quality vs. length and the use of the term "long-form." Of course, when you're going to invest time in reading a story, quality is key. So while searching for your next great long read, here are a few resources to keep in mind:

• Longform.org: Longform.org is sponsored by a University of Pittsburg writing program. The site curates a few stories each day, most recently published, but a few older — a New Yorker essay from 1986, for example. The stories they pull are from all across styles and publications, from Sports Illustrated to Rolling Stone to BuzzFeed. The authors also include long-form podcasts, a new one every Wednesday. You can save a story to read later, or if you stumble across something great, suggest a story for them to feature.
• Longreads.com: Longreads, which is sponsored by The Atlantic, picks five long-form pieces from around the Internet to share every week. Along with a short description of the story, Longreads includes the word count and the approximate length of time the story will take to read, so you can pick something you'll be able to finish over your lunch break.
• Epic: If you're looking for dramatic, Epic is the place to look. The idea is to share "stories worth remembering." The titles include zombies, robots and the original story on which the movie "Argo" was based. To make it even more exciting, each piece has it's own movie-like title poster. 
• BuzzReads: BuzzFeed created its own long-form section in 2013, and in true BuzzFeed form, reporters curate a weekly list of long-form articles — some published by BuzzFeed and some from around the Internet. To make finding a story even easier, they'll send the list straight to your inbox every week.