UPDATE: This offer is now closed (as of 7/19/2011). Thanks to NYRB and all the Longreads Members who signed up!
Last month we introduced the (completely optional) Longreads Membership, and we’ve been thrilled with the response so far. I wanted to personally thank everyone for their support and encouragement.
We’re also excited to announce the first official perk for our Longreads Members: a free, three-month digital subscription to the New York Review of Books.
We hope to continue offering occasional free perks to Longreads Members as a thank-you for your support of our service. It might be a digital subscription, like today’s perk, or it might just be something we think you’ll like because you have really great taste.
Every time I think @markarms couldn’t get any more genius with Longreads.com, he goes and adds some brilliant piece of functionality I hadn’t even considered.
Introducing automatic #longreads aggregation – No sign up, no reg, no passwords, no crap. If you’ve ever tweeted the hashtag, then you’ve already got an account. Just go to longreads.com/(YOURTWITTERNAME) and there they are.
Fun fact: Longreads turned 2 years old last month.
Since then, our community has blown up into something bigger but still just as wonderful.
So today we’re launching Community Picks, a new section on Longreads designed to showcase all the amazing stories you’re sharing every day. Community Picks features the most popular and recent tweets on the #longreads hashtag. Go take a look around.
We’re excited about this, because it’s the community that powers Longreads, and we wanted to find ways to better highlight everyone’s diverse reading tastes.
Here’s another nice thing: You can also share your own reading list based on recent stories you’ve tweeted as #longreads. (Here’s Michelle Legro’s list as an excellent example.) If you’re a regular Longreader, type your Twitter username into this URL to see them: http://www.longreads.com/usernamehere. You can add to the list by tweeting stories with the #longreads tag.
There are still some quirks, but we’re excited to keep building. If you see anything strange, or if you do not want to be featured in the Community Picks section, drop me a note (mark@longreads.com).
And a few thank yous: Longreads is powered with support from Twitter, Readability and Instapaper, so we’d like to thank all of them for their help over the past several months.
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One last thing: Help us keep growing and become a Longreads Member
Today I’m also launching a fund-raising campaign that I hope will be successful enough to keep building Longreads and the services associated with it.
For $3 a month, you can become a Longreads Member, which will get you early access to new features, and hopefully some other very small, modest perks in the future. If you buy a one-year subscription upfront, you’ll save $6 and you’ll get a limited-edition Longreads Travel Mug.
This is all totally optional—Longreads will remain free for all users. That said, a Longreads Membership is a great way to show your support for the service and ensure that we continue to grow.
Thanks to the entire Longreads community for a great two years. More soon.
Rob Sheffield and company at Rolling Stone Longreads (Taken with Instagram at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe)
such a wonderful discussion tonight! sammie rubes and i were sitting way in the back but still really enjoyed the journalism war stories and advice
Thanks everyone for a fun night with Rolling Stone, Longreads and Housing Works. Packed house and excellent audience questions for Rob Sheffield, Jeff Goodell, Brian Hiatt and Will Dana.
To get you ready for the panel, we’ve collected a couple great stories from each of the three panelists: Jeff Goodell, Brian Hiatt and Rob Sheffield.
Jeff Goodell:
The Dark Lord of Coal Country, Nov. 29, 2010: The Rolling Stone investigation that forced the resignation of Don Blankenship, the coal industry’s dirtiest CEO
As the World Burns, Jan. 6, 2010: How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most agressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming
More DiMaggio, this from the renowned paleontologist and ponderer of evolution—contemplating, here, what it means to have a hot streak (i.e., to cheat death).
The boyishly witty inventor of field-level participatory journalism here is a careful observer—of everything surrounding Henry Aaron’s home-run that broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime record.
I had a courtside seat for that game in Indianapolis, on the Princeton bench. I was a sophomore, small — too small, and slow — forward on that 1996 team. The only action I saw was the pregame layup lines. But countless times over the past 15 years, my former teammates and I have all had conversations, even with people we’ve just met, along these lines:
“Oh yeah, you played basketball at Princeton? Were you in that team that beat UCLA?”
“Yes.”
“Man, I remember that game, I was at my frat house at Scranton going wild.” Or “I was at a sports bar in Baltimore,” or “I was in my den, screaming at the television.” People — and, believe me, not just Princeton or UCLA alums — know precisely where they were, what they were doing and what they were drinking (often alcohol) during that game.
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