guidelines

How Long Should a Story Be?

Tom Scocca · 02/26/16 05:45PM

Some articles should be short. Some articles should be long. No articles, as Vox and its SB Nation demonstrated, should be longform. Greg Howard’s postmortem of SB Nation’s “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?” debacle offers lots of insights into how a story can go wrong, but the most concise may be his reporting that a freelancer for SB Nation’s now-closed Longform section “said that per the terms of his contract, the story had to be at least 4,000 words long.”

The 2013 Guidelines for Coming Out

Rich Juzwiak · 01/18/13 01:00PM

Jodie Foster's second public mention of Cydney Bernard — her ex-girlfriend/ partner/ roommate/euphemism/whatever, of something like 16 years -– at Sunday's Golden Globe Awards, left people confused. They argued loudly, angrily on Twitter and elsewhere, about whether this counted as Foster's real coming out and, if in fact it did, whether she did it correctly by voicing apparent anger, frustration and conflict over her cultural obligation of having to discuss her private life at all.