Search Results for: advertising

How the Emperor Became Human (and MacArthur Became Divine)

The sun goddess Amaterasu, the divine ancestor of the Emperors of Japan, emerging from a cave. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Victor Sebestyen | 1946: The Making of the Modern World | Pantheon Books | November 2015 | 23 minutes (6,202 words)

Below is an excerpt from 1946, by Victor Sebestyen, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.  Read more…

Looking for Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles

Hollywood, 1923. Photo: Library of Congress

Judith Freeman | Pantheon Books | December 2007 | 38 minutes (9603 words)

Judith Freeman traces Raymond Chandler’s early days in Los Angeles and his introduction to Cissy Pascal, the much older, very beautiful woman who would later become his wife.  This chapter is excerpted from Freeman’s 2007 book The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, which Janet Fitch described as “part biography, part detective story, part love story, and part séance.” Freeman’s next book—a memoir called The Latter Days—will be published by Pantheon in June 2016.

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The Most Haunted Road in America

Greetings from Clinton Road, N.J.
Illustrations by Matt Lubchansky

Taffy Brodesser-Akner | Atlas Obscura | October 2015 | 20 minutes (4,944 words)

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

1.

In a part of New Jersey where snakes slither slowly across a road, still coiled and yet somehow still moving; in a part of New Jersey where an insect that looks like a miniaturized bat sits on your windshield, menacing you while you make a sound that doesn’t sound quite like you from inside your car; in a part of New Jersey with a disproportionate amount of road kill in an already highly populated-by-road kill state; in a part of New Jersey where your phone cannot, will not pick up any kind of signal; here, in West Milford, in the county of Passaic, lies Clinton Road, a 10-mile stretch of haunted highway. Read more…

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Why Do We Judge Virgins?

Jessica Gross | Longreads | August 2015 | 14 minutes (3,532 words)

 

Rachel Hills’ first book, The Sex Myth, presents a radical deconstruction of our cultural narratives about sex. Hills, an Australian journalist and blogger who lives in New York, argues that we have imbued sex with undue meaning, treating it as one of the most important markers of our identities. This overemphasis, she writes, is the root of both our fear of sex as a dangerous force and our lionization of it as a vital act. Moreover—and this is the part I found most revelatory—Hills describes how we have moved from decrying promiscuity as dirty to treating sex as a source and symbol of liberation to, now, upholding sexual adventurousness as the ultimate good. Being promiscuous and adventurous in bed, she argues, has transformed from being an option to an obligation. Conversely, having vanilla tastes, or a seemingly less-than-exciting sex life, has come to be regarded as a badge of shame. Hills’ wish: that we treat all sexual appetites and practices (including not having sex) as legitimate and, further, that we deemphasize sex’s role in our self-definition.

Hills and I—who work in the same writers’ co-working space in downtown Manhattan—wandered to Washington Square Park on a hot afternoon in June. We discussed her writing process, delved into the theory of her book, and talked about grade school crushes.

This book was seven years in the making. Could you start by telling me how the idea first came to you, and whether it then took a while to get the guts to pursue it as a project?

When I was 24, I was walking home from a party with a friend one night in Sydney, having a casual conversation. My friend is a very outspoken, forthright person, so she just turns to me and says in this kind of outraged-at-herself way, “Rachel, can you believe that next month it’ll be two years since I’ve had sex and one year since I’ve kissed anyone?”

I think I tried to play it cool at the time, but it was a revolutionary moment for me. I had, to some extent, bought into this idea that we have about people in their twenties, and single people, and the kinds of sex lives that they have. Even though my sex life was very barren—nothing to write home about, or to write about in a book—I assumed that most other people I knew had sex lives that were very different. So the fact that this girl, who I considered to be really cool, was admitting she had a sex life that did not fit our culture’s idea of what cool is, was really interesting to me and unexpected. Read more…

Joyce Maynard on Taking James Patterson’s Online Course in Writing Bestsellers

Lately, just about every time I turn to Facebook or Twitter, I’m greeted by an ad or sponsored content about the online writing course bestselling thriller author James Patterson offers on the MasterClass site (where Dustin Hoffman, Annie Liebovitz, Usher, Serena Williams and others serve up the tricks to their trades, too). “Set out to write a bestselling book,” the copy advertising the course suggests. For an investment of just $90 and three hours of your time, it’s an enticing offer. But I haven’t bitten yet.

Author Joyce Maynard gave in to the temptation. At at the Observer, she reports on the experience:

…In my ungenerous moments, I confess to having harbored a certain not-particularly-attractive level of bitterness over the success of writers like John Grisham and—above all others—James Patterson, a man who holds the title as the world’s best-selling author, publishing so many novels a year that he needs a whole stable of collaborators just to keep up with the demand…

…I entered into this project with a large measure of skepticism—worse, even: I entered anticipating that his lessons might offer up some great comedy material—by the time the last lesson was over, and Mr. Patterson (Jim, to me, now) had set me loose to write my best seller, I had developed genuine respect for the man. Even affection. If I met him at a book festival some day, and the opportunity arose, I’d greet him like an old friend.

What changed? For starters, Mr. Patterson possesses an abundance of good, solid common sense and some genuinely valuable wisdom. Not necessarily about the art of writing, mind you. But about storytelling. And at the end of the day, if you ask me (and more importantly, if you ask readers and book buyers), that’s what matters most. A person can write the most beautiful, lyrical sentences (as James Patterson will be the first to tell you, he does not), but if the story doesn’t grab a reader by the throat, and—having grabbed on—hold her there, none of the rest may matter all that much.

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The Sale of the FT and an Oral History of the News Business

The FT Group, which includes standout business newspaper the Financial Times, is being sold for $1.3 billion to Nikkei, Japan’s largest media company. Established in 1888, the FT has been lauded for its digital transition as the newspaper industry has declined. “Riptide” is an oral history project that was first launched in 2013 about what “really happened to the news business,” by John Huey, Martin Nisenholtz, Paul Sagan, and John Geddes—and it includes an interview with a former FT.com managing director about its beginnings on the web in 1995, and its decision to start out as a free website:

I have to say, I think, in the early stages, free was the only way that people knew how to do it. Just from a technical point of view, a free website is the path of least resistance. All you need is a CMS and an ad server and, hey, you’re in business. The other element within this was, I think that the leadership at the “FT,” and I think at publishers across the market as a whole, simply didn’t really understand some of the long term strategic implications of this stuff.

They understood that they needed to be involved in the Web, but I don’t think anybody had really thought through how was this going to play out, and at the time, it was a really pretty small part of the business.

They were presented with a proposition that said, “The quickest, easiest, simplest way to do this is a free website, and we’ll make the money through advertising.” That ticked the boxes, so that’s the way everybody went.

I don’t think there was a point where the whole industry sat down and decided, they compared all the models and advertising was the way to go. As I say, it simply was the path of least resistance.

The “FT,” had a reassessment on this, around about 2001, when the dot com bubble started bursting. At that point, we had noticed that there were some issues for us as an organization with the advertising model.

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The Benefits of Being No. 2 in Business

Back in the early 1960s, also-ran Avis — a smaller, less successful business than Hertz — decided to run a new advertising campaign, one that embraced its market position rather than trying to change it. “When you’re only No. 2, you try harder. Or else,” the company’s advertisements read. Avis’s initial business insight was to locate its cars at airports, not in downtowns, but its most ingenious one was to play up its inferior position. It focused on its newer fleet and better customer service, promising, “We’re always emptying ashtrays,” and “Since we’re not the big fish, you won’t feel like a sardine when you come to our counter.” The strategy worked: The company moved from the red to the black and expanded its market share — even, within a few years, coming close to beating Hertz.

It makes sense: Differentiate in order to compete. Upscale or downscale. Don’t go head to head. And so Lyft is driving away from it again — or, rather, doubling down on what made it different in the first place. “We’ve gotten to or are getting to scale in all our cities,” Zimmer told me. “What’s the next experiential push that helps us realize the broader vision?”

—What’s next for ridesharing’s biggest underdog? Annie Lowrey takes a look in “Can Lyft Pull an Avis?” in New York magazine.

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The Craft of Cooking

Jessica Gross | Longreads | June 2015 | 18 minutes (4,479 words)

 

In 1980, 29-year-old Christopher Kimball enrolled in a cooking class and was so frustrated by his instructors’ inability to answer his questions that he started his own cooking magazine. Cook’s Magazine, since reborn as Cook’s Illustrated, presents a small number of recipes refined through extraordinarily rigorous testing by the cooks in Kimball’s 2,500-square-foot kitchen lab. The bimonthly magazine—which features only black-and-white illustrations—eschews a focus on “lifestyle” in favor of treating cooking as a discipline and a craft. Over the years, Cook’s Illustrated has garnered a large and loyal readership—and spawned an empire, including a second magazine, Cook’s Country; many cookbooks; and two television shows. “America’s Test Kitchen,” the most popular cooking show on public television, is currently in its 15th season. We spoke by phone about what it takes to write a crystal-clear recipe, the Cook’s Illustrated business model, and Kimball’s not-quite success getting his own kids in the kitchen.

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I want to get into the nitty-gritty of writing recipes that are really easy for people to follow. In thinking about our conversation, I remembered that in middle school, I had to do a project called “Write It Do It.” You were given a structure and had to write out, step by step, how to put it together. Your partner got these instructions and then had to try to construct a replica, which you’d then compare with the original.

That’s great—I should do that with my test cooks.

Well, we did horribly—my partner and I came in second to last or something—which drove home how difficult it is to describe in words how to physically construct something specific. So, when you’re writing a recipe, how do you make crystal clear what the cook is supposed to be doing?

Yeah, that’s the essence of it—and it’s made even more difficult because every home cook’s kitchen is different. The cookware is different, the stovetop is different, the oven is different and they almost never use the right ingredients, or they substitute ingredients and leave ingredients out. So the variables beyond your control are substantial. In your case, if you have a set of Legos on a desk, you know exactly what the components are. In our case, they don’t have all the Legos. They substituted some other puzzle game for half the Legos and they aren’t going to actually build a whole building; they’ll leave out parts of it. And they won’t read your directions entirely. They’ll read parts of it but not fully. So it’s more like, “Write It, Kinda Do It.” Read more…

Trouble in the Bloomberg Solar System

The Bloomberg was often seen inside the company it built as a sort of heavenly body. Dan Doctoroff likened it to the sun, a “life-giving force” that sustains its orbiting planets of business and media ventures. The CEO kept a model of the solar system near his desk, with a tiny replica of The Bloomberg affixed to the sun. The analogy might have even been too limited. There are now 324,000 Bloombergs in operation. Each brings in more than $20,000 in annual subscription fees per user. Bloomberg’s annual revenue is about $9 billion, with gross profit approaching $3 billion, according to Douglas Taylor of Burton-Taylor International Consulting, a market research and consulting firm that closely tracks the privately held company. The lion’s share of that profit comes from the terminal, which Bloomberg’s media operation and its 2,400 journalists exist to serve. Started by Winkler as a supplement to the terminal, the wire service has evolved into an essential feature. Taylor estimates that Bloomberg’s terminal business would suffer a 30 to 50 percent hit if Bloomberg News were to disappear.

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To stay solvent today, almost every media outlet strikes a devil’s bargain with its business model, some more offensive than others. (BuzzFeed, for instance, has deleted posts that big advertisers object to.) The difference with Bloomberg is that its news service doesn’t merely grapple with that questionable compact—it was born from it. Bloomberg News was created to fuel the sun, not to be sustained by it in virtuous orbit. That is a tension that may never be resolved, a gap between business and influence, Owner and Mayor, a conflict inherent in the DNA of the company created in Mike Bloomberg’s image.

Which is why everything at Bloomberg, ultimately, begins and ends with what is going on in the black box of a billionaire’s brain. It has always been thus. Bloomberg is, as many of his employees told me, a brainy, unpredictable, sometimes irrational actor driven by ego. He has never been able to let the media professionals take over.

Politico Magazine senior correspondent Luke O’Brien reports on the existential problem facing the 73-year-old billionaire’s eponymous company as he returns to run it.

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