In 2016 a Pew report looked at how readers interacted with over 74,000 articles on their mobile phones. It concluded that long-form reporting was holding its own despite the shift to mobile, boasting a higher engagement rate (123 seconds compared with 57.1 for short-form stories) and the same number of visits:

“While 123 seconds – or just over two minutes – may not seem long, and afar cry from the idealized vision of citizens settling in with the morning newspaper, two minutes is far longer than most local television news stories today.”

Tweaking the concept of long-form

But buried in the report were some problems: only 3 percent of long-form and 4 percent of short-form news returned to the content once they left it — and both types of articles had brief lifespans after content was posted, with interaction after three days dropping by 89 percent for short-form and 83 percent for long-form.

Moreover, an “overwhelming majority of both long-form readers (72%) and short-form readers (79%) view just one article on a given site over the course of a month on their cellphone.”

Long-form content appeared to be performing better than short-form content on most measures — but it was a pretty low bar.

If the genre is to survive in the current digital environment the prevailing concept of long-form journalism, it seems, still needs tweaking so that readers read more stories, return to them more frequently in order to finish them, and engage for even longer periods.

To view the 17 rhetorical terms, visit Online Journalism Blog: https://onlinejournalismblog.com/2019/10/05/longform-narrative-rhetorical-concepts/