Social
Can Wired Make Instagram Journalism Mainstream?
When Wired.com editor Joe Brown posted his first images on Instagram, in 2010, he had to snap photos on his Android and transfer them to his iPad just to be able to upload to the platform. Over the last five years, Instagram has evolved from an app that could make your photos look like boxy polaroids to a publishing machine with more than 400 million users. And as part of that evolution, Instagram is no longer a place just for images and hashtags—it’s fast becoming a home for longform journalism.
In early November, Wired became the first major publication to debut a longform story exclusively on Instagram.[note]Wired eventually published the story with a different title, “The Land That the Internet Era Forgot,” a few days later on its website.[/note] “Left Behind in a High-Speed World,” follows a man who teaches rural Mississippians about the value of being online. (Mississippi ranks last in the country for high-speed household Internet access.) The story was released as a series of 11 Instagram posts that combined stunning photography with long passages of text included in the captions. As part of a package on equality in the digital age, writer W. Ralph Eubanks not only profiles the teacher, but also shapes the story as part memoir and history, which was challenging for the design department to illustrate.
Instead of giving the piece a standard treatment, photo editor Sarah Silberg asked photographer Tabitha Soren to capture mostly atmospheric shots. “We wanted to set the scene for the story to take place in,” Silberg explained over the phone.
When the photos came back, it didn’t seem right to shoehorn them into a magazine format. “They were all so powerful, it felt strange to make some of them small and some of them big,” Brown explained. “As we do at Wired right now, you assign a featured story and you figure out the best platform for it once it comes in. Usually that’s a choice between the magazine, the digital edition, the website, and video. But in this case, we were lucky that the story itself asked to be on Instagram.”
The platform also seemed poised for such a project. Certain publishers have started to experiment with text on Instagram. Humans of New York, which posts short nonfiction profiles, has 4.2 million followers, and as we covered this summer, the literary magazine Virginia Quarterly Review began testing longer Instagram articles. Around the same time Wired released its story, Instagram also launched curated content streams, telling users they could “Watch Halloween Live.” In previous months, the app began allowing non-square images in feeds.
As it has grown, Instagram has become more versatile, encouraging users and publications to play, but on a platform where users might expect mindless image scrolling, a slew of words isn’t exactly inviting. National Geographic, for example, has one of the best Instagram accounts in publishing, but when’s the last time you read a paragraph on its feed about arctic exploration or orangutans?
One possible solution to overcoming the word slog is a choose-your-own-adventure approach. The way Wired divided the narrative, readers could begin on any image and still get enough context to explore the rest of the story.
When trying to attract readers to a longform piece, Brown saw the flexibility and piecemeal nature of the social platform as a plus. “We are all so distracted and we’re chunking up our lives into digestible bits,” he said. “What’s cool about Instagram is that it gave us these visual bookmarks.”
Wired published all 11 images at once, which left some users complaining that the magazine “blew up the feed.” But Brown’s top priority was giving users the chance to read the story in order. If Wired serialized the story and waited days between installments, he wouldn’t have been able to post anything else on Instagram in the meantime. And while the all-at-once approach might have made some people mad, Brown is happy that it piqued their interest at all: “If you put out eleven really striking photos with eleven pushing-the-boundaries-of-Instagram-caption-limit captions, you get people’s attention.”
While haters are everywhere online, if you make your way to the end of the story, you’ll see something you might not have thought possible: Three separate people wrote coherent, genuine sentences in praise of Wired‘s project. The best of them? @jenpioneerpress, who wrote, “I read it all and probably wouldn’t have otherwise.”
To anyone in social media or publishing, those should be the magic words. In a world where homepages have gone the way of phone booths, publications have to be sending messages on the move. New audiences await, whether they’re 13-year-olds addicted to Snapchat or rural Mississippians just beginning to grasp the opportunities of the Internet.
Writer W. Ralph Eubanks recognizes the value of reaching new audiences on Instagram, and while he conceded that “it is a little odd for it to exist right now exclusively on a social media platform,” he told me he sees Instagram as a way to build an audience for the story until it is presented in full. Publishing on Instagram didn’t reduce the editorial process for him; he worked with editor John Gravois to create the excerpts of the story.
How does the business side of Wired feel about all this? As of yet, this story hasn’t resulted in direct referrals, which means no ad deals. But as Brown told me, “If we find a way to dramatically engage readers, they’ll be there with a way to figure out how to make it work for us,” he said.
Brown also believes that the story has started conversations about how to post in ways that feel more socially native. As a magazine that focuses on technology, Wired seems obligated to lead that charge. “Seeing the world changing the way we have institutionally, we feel a great responsibility to be there when it changes the next time,” Brown said.
Publishers stuck on reiterating web content or posting shots from around the office should take note of Wired‘s example. Instagram has moved past its old square crops and borders. It’s time for others to do the same.
[Full disclosure: Ella Riley-Adams works for The New Yorker, which, like Wired, is owned by Condé Nast.]
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