Suddenly everyone wants New Yorker style content. Who is going to write it?

Look at BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post's strategies (at least for reporters and news, not for the entertainment parts of their site). They quickly managed to establish themselves by luring big names who people would want to read. It's probably near-impossible to quickly do the reverse.

Isn't that a job for a copy editor? A nice thing to have a but a good regular editor is more important.

But I did wonder while reading the piece what Pando Daily's editorial setup is like. Does it bear any resemblance to the process she went through earlier in her career?

With the comma, the phrase is equivalent to:

"... readers will only read long-form content, and that only if it is excellent."

(Forgive me if my usage of that is no longer current. It has been quite a while since I've spent an extended period of time with current formal writing.) The intended meaning was probably something like this:

"... readers will only put the effort into reading long-form content if it is excellent."

This is a strange article. I say strange because Sarah Lacy hasn't seem to look into what "New Yorker style" prose / stories look or feel like. The New Yorker is not only a publisher of journalism. It also does short stories, serializations, and I generally consider it an incubator of literary thoughts, methods, and practices the way YCombinator is an incubator of entrepreneurship.

Just look at the list of authors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_Yorker_contribu...

Raymond Carver, JD Salinger, Alice Munroe, Vladimir Nabokov, VS Naipaul, Dorothy Parker, Philip Roth among others.

I don't know if Sarah has looked through the some New Yorker Magazines and actually read the stories.

Who's going to found those startups that YCombinator is looking for? Those dedicated, driven, individuals and teams with a single-minded focus to creating a service, a company, a product that people will pay for.

Who's going to write New Yorker style stories? Those driven, single-minded, not-immediate-money-driven and creative individuals and teams (writer/editor teams, etc) who will do whatever it takes to push forward the written form.

But of course, writing the truth never bought anyone any favours with advertisers.

This is the wrong approach. You don't train someone to produce such works.

These types of proses are more like a personal distillation of experiences. You can take a handful of olympic athletes, pair them up with a great editor and writer team, and come up with a great story about what happened at the london olympics. That would be a cover worthy story.

It's not about training writers who can churn out articles. It's about understanding that writing itself is an art, not something that can be trained, but something that needs to be invented.

Put it in terms that people on hacker news would probably understand - Writing a major New Yorker cover story is like finding the topic, writing, and then defending a PhD thesis. You have to come up with an original thought, support it with research and original experimentation, distill it down, test your hypothesis, and see if your thesis is still solid. After rounds and rounds of editing, repositioning, rewriting, and PIVOTING, you come out with a kernel of an article - the amount of words written would be approx 10 - 20 times the amount of text that would actually be published. The rest would be research material and stuff "left on the editing table".

You can't train that. Successful authors understand this - all of their advice to young writers would include something like - "only you know what kind of story you want to write" - "keep practicing" "keep writing every day".

There is no handbook to learn, no school to go to.

Journalism school gives you a template of what other people have done, but at the same time, I consider it a waste of time for writers. Just go out there experience the world, talk to as many people as you can, and write seriously every single day. You'll come out the other side with a comparable set of skills as someone who went to school for journalism.

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So what is the right approach? For me, it would be encouragement - start young - get education right. Bring up childhood and adult literacy, give people the ability to think and reason. Increase funding to schools and give teachers a better deal.

You'll find more and more kids wanting to write, keep practicing it, and thus we get better writers when they grow up.

For the immediate situation, the same thing applies - give people who want to write the chance to tell their story. Increase funding commitments to schools and higher education.

Get people talking about writing as an actual practice instead of as an advertising technique (ie writing copy) or as a purely legalistic/procedural language (ie taxes, lawsuits, and manuals).

People will become more interested in writing and the skills required in literacy.

Who knows, the best story might be hiding there in the heart of that guy you pass by every day living on the streets.