New media formats and long-form journalism

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer of Forbes, writes about how his journalists are using new media strategies to boost their audience for long-form articles.

Dvorkin writes, “Recent events lead me to Kashmir Hill, who has truly found her digital rhythm and is working to find her long-form journalism voice.

“Kashmir covers digital privacy issues, quite a hot topic in the era of social media. Her monthly audience on Forbes.com runs about 500,000 and sometimes more, with a strong repeat visitor base. She has 6,700 Twitter followers, 530 followers on Forbes.com and 40,000 Facebook Subscribe public followers. Kashmir’s inserted herself into the fabric of her community by using all the methods outlined above, including curating and filtering content for her followers (as she did with a recent New York Times magazine story). In the current issue of FORBES magazine Kashmir has a long piece on Facebook’s Top Cop. Since it was published on Forbes.com, she’s made a strong connection with her audience despite modest page views (perhaps this print-story-turned-post needed a more Web-friendly headline, not the magazine version). At the moment I checked on Friday night, nearly 40% of users continued to the second screen of her story and almost 100% of those who did read the last two pages.

“Greg McNeal, a FORBES contributor, commented on my last post, citing Kashmir’s long-form story as part of his new digital reading habits:

My consumption of written information in the last two weeks included Marc Ambinder’s 80 page e-book, a few 35,000 word law review articles in .PDF form and in print form, Kash Hill’s longer piece on Facebook’s security officer, blog posts from dozens of websites, and of course the daily dose of Tweets with links to blogs, and long and short form journalism. I started some of my reading on my iPhone, continued to read them on my iPad, and finished them on my laptop or desktop computer in all manner of places (Starbucks, office, couch, car, etc.)

“Over the last few months, 20% of Forbes.com traffic has come in through our new mobile site — and it spiked even higher a few weekends ago. The iPhone, iPad and Android breakdown fascinates me, as do the number of pages users of each device consume (a little tip here: the industry is gaga over apps, but keep an eye on the browser). As Chief Product Officer, it’s my job to devour the data across our digital and print products — and the interaction between the two — and to develop appropriate short form and long form consumer experiences.”

Read more here.