95pc of time.com stories are ‘original to the web’

A few thoughts on why long-form journalism “doesn’t fly” online, and what does, from time.com managing editor Josh Tyrangiel. H/T to @mrinternet.

A couple of pull-out quotes on understanding that people who read news online are often at work and in a hurry:

“Our goal is to make people smarter while saving them time.

“The challenge is, how do I be smart and stylish, but get to the point, and get people the information they need right away? That conceptually is how you take Time and make it Time.com

“We try…  to prioritise what is important, write about it intelligently but quickly and to communicate constantly, ‘We’re aware, we know where you are.’ That means that our homepage doesn’t have subheads. The challenge to our editors is: write headlines that are SEO friendly, smart, clever and get the story across.

“In trying to understand the way people use the medium, I think we have differentiated our product form other people… There are great newspaper sites out there but ultimately they are writing for a newspaper and…they’re just taking it and putting it online.

“Ninety-five per cent of time.com stories are original to the web.”