The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. [For] to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves-and the better the teacher, the better the student body.
– Warren Buffett
I’ve mentioned longform.org, a site my friend Max and his friend Aaron started April 2010. From an education standpoint, though they didn’t start the site for education, longform is perfect for schools wondering how they can find and incorporate extended, high-interest quality non-fiction reading into their curricula.
But this post isn’t about the classroom.
Longform has curated it’s Top 10 (or 20) best pieces of long-form journalism of 2011. With the list’s publication, my reading list for the next few weeks has been set. I also subscribe to the site’s spin-off, sendmeastory.com, which does what the name implies each weekend. Two weeks ago, I got this story from Esquire about Michael May a man who had been blind his entire life and his struggle over whether to undergo surgery that could give him sight.
I cried.
That’s not an infrequent occurrence as I read stories from longform. The site does the work of collecting the most interesting and impactful stories being told and putting them in one place. What’s more, they’ve fully integrated Readability, Instapaper, Read It Later and Kindle queueing so I’m not tied to the computer screen when I want to read.
While I still think longform is the unintentional answer to the wants of many a curriculum designer, I know it’s the intentional answer to the wants of anyone in search of a well-crafted piece of journalism.