Salmon on blogging vs. long-form journalism

Damien Hoffman of Wall St. Cheat Sheet interviewed prolific Reuters blogger Felix Salmon about whether long-form financial journalism has a place in today’s world of bloggers.

Here is an excerpt:

Damien Hoffman: Where do you see a place for long form journalism within the context of blogging?

Felix: I think blogs are a wonderful way of driving attention and traffic to long form journalism. Vanity Fair is doing a spectacularly good job of covering business and finance, and has been since before Portfolio closed. They actually poached Michael Lewis from Portfolio before it closed. They’ve had Bethany McLean. They’ve got Bryan Burrough, Todd Purdum, Bill Cohen, and a great roster of really good long form journalists there. They’re batting a thousand with what they’re doing.

“Vanity Fair obviously has a nice budget. They have a good base of luxury advertisers which no other financial magazine has. Graydon Carter is perfectly happy to subsidize long wonky pieces about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with the kind of audience he gets from putting half naked starlets on the cover — and that’s great.  That’s a brilliant business model. I’m in favor of it.

“People don’t come to blogs just to read the blog and stop.  They come to blogs because blogs link to great stuff, and one of the foremost things that blogs link to is long form journalism.  For instance, when Portfolio published that great Michael Lewis piece The End, it also appeared online and got literally millions and millions of page views. People would read it online or print it and read it on the train. A lot of that was driven by the blogs linking and saying, ‘Oh my God, you have to read this — it’s really good.'”

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