What is the longest article you ever wrote?

Did a big blow out on disordered eating patterns in athletes many a moons ago. It was the center spread and then jumped to two full pages inside. It was a lot of words

Also did a diary-type story with a hs football player who was being heavily recruited. I met with him once a week, from August until signing day. There was short piece explaining the process, the diary itself which was pretty big and then a column that outlined how I approached it and how it impacted me. Many words. Not as much as the eating one.

 

Just checked.

One-day feature, I think the piece that I believe to be my longest was 2,900 words.

Now, I wrote a two-day feature, which was really a one-day feature broken into two parts, that checked in at around 3,600 words.

I had a feature that finished really high in APSE that was 2,485 words. (Not trying to toot my horn - I bring that up as some evidence that a piece can be both long and considered good, a contention that gets some resistance in this business.)

I always wanted to be a magazine writer anyway, but just screwed up my path.

 

I had a three day series that was over 200 inches. I co-wrote a series that ran over eight days and was over 500 inches total.

I've written a few "profile" pieces that were 100-120 inches. These were usually instances where I spent the week with someone or something like that. They were by far my favorite kind of stories to do, especially if they didn't need the story turned around super quickly.

 

150 inches broken up over 2 weeks (weekly paper). Lots of quotes but that's how I wanted to present the story because they were from former players and coaches about a local hoops coach who was in the hospital, again. At the time there were rumors he was on his last legs. He lived another 2 years but the story, one of my first at the paper, let readers know what they were getting out of the new SE.

I wrote a lot of long stories at that paper.

 

Of course something can be long and good.

I make the contention, however, that you'll get WAY more eyes on a 15-incher than a 200-incher.

Many newspaper readers won't make the commitment to read 200 inches, regardless of quality or subject matter.

 

My first paper did a lot of project writing because they were obsessed with winning awards. I loved those assignments, but not when they happened during the season. "In addition to writing a lead, notebook and sidebar every day this week, can you also give us a 60-inch feature for Sunday?"

 

The APSE-winning one was very widely read because it was pretty juicy. I got a lot of feedback on the 2,900-word feature, but it was mostly from the subject's particular sports community, which is rabid. (He had recently died.)

But, yeah, I suspect that general readership on it wasn't huge, particularly since it ran on Christmas Day. What was nice was that I was receiving emails about it weeks after the fact, due to the magic of the Internet keeping it alive.

 

Longest print piece I've ever written was 5,000 words, along with multimedia bonus components, for a travel magazine.

Longest newspaper piece I've ever written was 72 inches, or about 2,800 words, broken into distinct but related chunks. That was nearly 20 years ago ... I would use a much different approach today.

 

I wonder what the average NYT A1 story runs. They don't have word counts attached like WSJ stories do on the Kindle.

OK, checked a couple of random stories. Today's Obama surveillance speech preview is 1,233. The story on NSA spying with radio transmitters is 2,278, I believe.

I wonder if they ever plan to scale down.

 

Thinking about it honestly, I don't care how long a story is as long as you follow "the first five grafs." Tell me what I need to know, and then I'll decide whether to read on or not.

These longform "features" that require you to follow some longwinded narrative in order to get the whole story? Those get one of these:

 

You and I are a little different with this, then. I'll definitely stick with something that's written in a narrative, much more so than I would something of the same length written in a straight news style or a profile not written chronologically. Narratives tell a story. I like having some mystery to pull me along. Time and a place, of course.

 

How long is the story about how he's in a sham marriage? Oh wait, wrong paper...