

What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories - patrick-james
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3009577/open-company/this-is-what-happens-when-publishers-invest-in-long-stories#comments?utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer65a7f

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hayksaakian
One concern pointed out in the comments was regarding SEO

A continually updating piece at new URLs looks like duplicate content. The
author mentioned that their Search traffic was the same, but I wonder what the
long term impacts are.

Clearly low bounce and high time on site are important, but I wonder if
fluctuating titles hurt them more than helped, and counteracted the increased
engagement.

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kolinko
well, if you provide a canonical name in the headers, the search engines will
not treat the page as a duplicate content

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lstamour
I wonder if The Verge sees a similar effect when they post longer features. I
certainly stick around there and at Polygon for the longer posts, not the
short blurbs that feel like they trick me into clicking them ...

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charleslmunger
Same, I downvote short posts with no real substance. They may have gotten the
pageview, but I'll do my best to prevent some other person from wasting their
time like I did.

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hispanic
The examples they give seem off to me - slowly-evolving thought pieces. (Of
course, I understand that their examples are limited to topics they would
typically cover.)

> ...and then build the article as the story develops over time, rather than
> just cranking out short, discrete posts every time something new breaks.

Seems to me that this format/style would be perfectly suited to more quickly-
evolving stories like the Boston Marathon bombings.

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omd
News media already use this format for developing stories, called "live
blogging". That's what the article refers to with the term "slow live
blogging". Like you said, it's slowly evolving rather than breaking news.

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hispanic
Good point. I didn't think about it that way. Thanks.

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tunesmith
I have trouble imagining the reading experience. You read it, then it updates
when you're not reading it, and... what? The RSS for it reactivates, but it's
still non-recent. Or we bookmark it to remind ourselves to check bank now and
again? It's not quite like a subscription... seems like it's a lot of mental
load to check back during those times when it hasn't been updated (scroll
scroll scroll... oh drat, it ended at the same point as last time)

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hispanic
I can imagine they would (eventually) provide a mechanism to be notified when
the article is updated. As for the scrolling, it looks like the most recent
portion is placed at the top - "But when more news breaks, you go back to the
article, insert an update at the top, and change..."

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duggan
Seems like some sort of curated current affairs Wikipedia (from an information
POV). It's an interesting idea, and certainly a technically interesting
project, especially for interaction design.

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fuzzix
I'd stick around longer to read the article if the funky little script driven
animation didn't cause my browser to peg a core.

