It’s really hard sometimes to set aside time to read a looooong magazine article. I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for many years, and I know how often I’m forced to put an issue aside because of pressure from the ticking clock. (Hint: way too often.)
But this — a new magazine, containing a single looooong article per issue, on topics I’m interested in — sounds too good to pass up. From the project’s Kickstarter page:
The web is the future of journalism, but let’s be honest: the future isn’t living up to expectations. Newspapers and magazines have cut back on in-depth reporting. Gossip sites have proliferated. The web has become a byword for fast and cheap. Why isn’t it synonymous with fearless, investigative and enthralling writing?
We think it can be…
MATTER will focus on doing one thing, and doing it exceptionally well. Every week, we will publish a single piece of top-tier long-form journalism about big issues in technology and science. That means no cheap reviews, no snarky opinion pieces, no top ten lists. Just one unmissable story.
MATTER is about brilliant ideas from all around the world, whether they come from professors at MIT or the minds of mad people. But most of all, it’s about getting amazing investigative reporters to tell compelling stories
I don’t know. Maybe too good to be true? But I figured it was worth laying at least a small bet on the table.
Thanks for sharing this, John. Long form investigative journalism has gone the way of the dino, but this is very encouraging, reporting with “length, weight and heft.” Based at what MATTER is bringing in at Kickstarter, it seems a lot of people agree with and welcome their mission.
But then there’s still the issue of time… But I’m going to keep an eye on this!
For a moment, having thought you’d said “…gone the way of the dingo,” I was about to compliment you for the freshness of the metaphor. ;)
They’ve gotten a HUGE Kickstarter response. Very encouraging.
[Aside: reCaptcha, as you may have noticed, offers up word pairs -- one of which is a "real" word, the other of which is nonsense. I think the current challenge is a classic, almost self-referential in its mystery: quarynil Krypticism.]
Ha! I think the word processor thingumajig (sorry, highly computer-illiterate) may have actually inserted dingo when I first typed dino. Shoulda left it that way, eh. ;)
Ha! Classic indeed! Word-veri in a nutshell.
oo! i agree! if it’s a good article, of course. fingers crossed for vigilant editors.
i’ve been subscribing to One Story for 5 years now–same premise, but fiction. i find i only like about 1 out of 3 stories, but that’s ok, because if something’s not taking it’s ok to put it aside (i have decided in my, um, old age).
Yeah — 1 in 3 is actually an awfully good average! (I probably really like, on average, 2.8 out of every 3 novels I read. But it’s easy to get to a score like that when I’m picking them for myself, heh.)