Longreads is becoming more social (and making a play at sustainability)

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
Last month, Rolling Stone brought three of its reporters to a Manhattan bookstore for a standing-room-only conversation about long-form journalism. The event was co-hosted by a hashtag.
At the time, #longreads, along with its associated Twitter feed, had just reached its second birthday. Founder Mark Armstrong had made the tag ubiquitous as a source for great nonfiction, helping to prompt the media business’ startled realization that people will actually read long stuff on the Internet. But could Longreads’ crowd of nonfiction fans, nearly 25,000 strong on the web, be mobilized to help support the creation of the stories they loved?
It’s a question that Armstrong is still working on as he continues Longreads’ development from media-geek favorite to industry standard. (NYT Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren used the tag Wednesday morning to announce the magazine’s latest cover story.)
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But the supply-side problem will not be an easy one to fix, at least for the highest end of longform. Former NYT Magazine editor Gerry Marzorati once noted that the magazine’s cover stories regularly cost upwards of $40,000. At that rate, per my speculative math, even if every single @Longreads follower donated $10 a year to pay for new stories, their joint purchasing power would only fund about six longform projects. That would be great, of course, but on a typical day, the feed posts at least four or five.
Armstrong’s first financial experiment is more basic: finding out whether #longreads aficionados might be willing to voluntarily shell out some cash for the support of @Longreads itself. He is asking for voluntary members at $3 a month, or $30 for a year (plus a Longreads mug). Since the membership push is new, Armstrong wasn’t willing to talk numbers yet (or to provide a size-related adjective). Same deal with the particular perks of membership. “The perks are fairly minimal right now,” he noted. “We hope to add more perks over time, but we don’t want people to come in with that expectation.”
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/05/making-longreads-more-social-on-the-web-and-in-the-store/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=94b42bdb3b-DAILY_EMAIL