| A cautionary message from someone who used to think long form content equals quality and indepth coverage: Long form content in magazines still used to have limited pages. So there needed to be a balance between information and prose. So even in long prose, the content was well edited, every sentence brought something important to the table. Nowadays, on the web, an article could have infinite length without any limits. Less editing skills required and more importantly, the longer you stay on page, the better their metrics. So the content tends to be way longer with more passages that do not really add anything to the central message. Most of them are approaching novellas in length. At one point in time, this became such a big time sink for me, I wrote a firefox extension to warn me how long the page was and how long I spent on it. I am a moderately good reader and still some of these articles would typically take 45 mins to finish. One heuristic I follow nowadays:
Before reading, I think about what my purpose of this article is, what I hope to learn from this exercise: (It could just even be entertainment) A few mins in, I see if this purpose is being fulfilled. If yes, I continue. If not, I just bail out. |
That said, the long-form essay is an ancient genre—much older than the modern magazine article—and they have always been filled with "irrelevant" asides, tangents, artistic flourishes, and so on. Concisely conveying their "central message" wasn't the primary point of the form, and people who enjoyed that type of essay wouldn't expect a linear explanation of the topic. The prose style, imaginative complexity, unexpected comparisons, digressions, and explorations were integral to the genre.
Sadly, great essays of that type take a long time to write and edit, and most people aren't interested in reading them. So we get long, repetitive, unimaginative junk instead.