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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Longform for iPad Highlights Best of Magazine WritingFriday, February 3, 2012 Two years old this April, the Longform.org project is a Web site after the magazine publishers’ hearts. In a (1).png) world of online blog posts, Tweets and unedited breaking news, it champions the art of the considered long piece. The site curates Web content, looking for non-fiction content that the site itself admits is “too long and too interesting to be read on the Web browser.” In fact, the editors recommend that users employ tools like Instapaper and Read It Later to save the items it discovers for later reading. With the iPad version, now available for $4.99, the Longform.org folks finally have their own post-desktop reading platform. The app is as straightforward and unadorned as the Web site. While the source material here is longer form, the posting style looks and feels like a common Web feed reader. You get about a paragraph and headline from the selected articles in a long blog-like scroll, both in the app and on the Web site. The app uses the left rail to highlight either the main curated feed or a series of subscribed channels for the major media brands. Magazine content is heavily favored here, from Businessweek and The Believer to The New Yorker and Esquire. Clicking into an article link brings the source page into an embedded browser. Longform’s take on aggregation is a bit different from close cousins like Flipboard and Zite. The browser by default pulls in the full Web site from the magazine destination, including all ads and other links. But in this case the browser has a Web and Read mode. The latter enlarges the text and removes the ads. Longform editor Max Linsky tells us that it is eager to work with publishers “to make sure their ads are as effective as possible.” Still the user can turn on a default “Read” mode that bypasses the publisher’s Web page format and ads. Any smart user will be quick to toggle the Read mode as the default, since it speeds up an otherwise sluggish browser. Longform for iPad has a lean tool set that is aimed at enhancing the lean back reading experience. The articles can be saved across platforms using Instapaper, Read It Later or the built-in Readability article saving function. Using the latter tool we were able to save articles on the Web site and have them show up on the iPad. In Read mode the user also can adjust font size and typeface. And there are the requisite sharing functions for pushing an article to the social networks, including Tumblr. Overall, Longform for iPad is a solid piece of work that does exactly what it says it does, find and make enjoyable the longer form articles that are uncomfortable to read at the desk in a browser. We would have liked another layer of tools like highlighting or having the ability to snip and send sections of an article elsewhere. And the embedded browser can be painfully slow in rendering the publisher's original Web page. But as it stands this is an app that does laudable work. It makes the ongoing case for magazine journalism in particular and keeps great brands just a little more visible and accessible.  If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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