Jan

Long-Form Journalism Platform Atavist Branches Out with Documentaries, Fiction

At last year’s Digital Book World conference, GoodeReader caught up with Atavist to talk about the rise in popularity of long-form journalism, digital short stories, and serialized ebook novellas. Rather than a sign that the attention span of the average reader is waning, as some critics will argue, long-form journalism is actually the opposite; it allows readers who would have only been presented with a strict word count to know more about the story, including background details, narrative, and prior knowledge-level information.

Atavist’s Evan Ratliff spoke with GoodeReader at this year’s DBW event to talk about how that popularity has led to even more platforms growing up to meet the need for novella length digital fiction and pieces of journalism that would have once been considered impossibly long for print media.

This growth has afforded Atavist the capability to expand into the production of a video-and-text documentary for digital consumption, as well as look ahead to opening the platform to more authors of more types of content.

Mercy Pilkington (1079 Posts)

Mercy Pilkington is a young-adult author and a teacher in a correctional facility. She does not have a single textbook in her classroom. With the top-of-the-line technology at her disposal and the low reading ability of many of her students, there’s no need for standard paper texts. Instead she relies on e-readers, iPads, desktop PCs, Polycom video conferencing equipment for virtual field trips, live streaming for science demonstrations, and text-to-speech read-aloud software to teach English and science. Within the next ten years, public school classrooms across the country are going to look a lot more like Mercy’s classroom because the educational possibilities with these kinds of technologies are limitless. Have a question? Send an email to mercypilkington@yahoo.com