Before we launched the Long Read in 2014, dozens of my new colleagues at the Guardian asked me versions of the same question: “So, what is a long read?” In other words, what will actually go into this new section of the paper? And how will it be different from the many features the newspaper is already publishing, apart from being longer?

In those early months, I found this question hard to answer. Or perhaps my elaborate descriptions of the criteria for hypothetical stories were not very illuminating, because my recollection is that nobody seemed to understand what I was on about.



Nearly four years and about 500 stories later, I think our colleagues and readers alike know what to expect from the Long Read. But it’s still not easy to provide a simple answer to the question “what is it?” with a definition that explains the common thread between stories about the rise of the British sandwich, the meaning of neoliberalism, the war between humans and rats, or the invention of political correctness – other than a commitment to produce stories that are worth the time it takes to read (or, increasingly these days, to listen to on our podcast).

In a way, the best answer is that the most distinctive thing about our section is not the large number of words in each story, but the small number of stories in our pages. We publish three pieces each week – on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Each story takes up three pages in the print newspaper – or about 15 minutes to read on your phone on the train.



As an editor, that means whatever we put in that space had better be worth the time – the time for you to read it, of course, but also the time that it takes to report, write and edit it, a process that usually takes more than a month and sometimes stretches to five or six. (At any given moment, there are about 25 stories in the process of being edited, and more than 50 being reported and written.) In comparison with the hectic working pace of our colleagues on the newsdesk, our working process sometimes looks more like making a television programme or a documentary film, although with rather less glamour and much smaller budgets.



Three years later, it turns out that readers (and listeners) love the sense of getting beneath the surface of something

The making of a Long Read almost always starts with a series of meetings. Most of them start with a pitch: every week we get about 50 ideas from journalists around the world, along with suggestions from our Guardian colleagues and new proposals from writers we’ve previously worked with. At the end of the week I sit down with the other two Long Read editors, Clare Longrigg and David Wolf, to review this pile of incoming ideas and to discuss new projects we might assign to our stable of regular writers. Should we do an essay about the rise of “clean eating”? Is there a good story to be written about the huge political scandal in Brazil? Why do so many leading politicians have PPE degrees from Oxford? What’s actually going to happen when the Queen dies?



What are we looking for in a story? It’s never easy to explain what separates the best ideas from the rest – but the great ones are immediately exciting. As soon as you hear it, you want to know more. Sometimes because it’s surprising or shocking or scandalous: the parents who murdered their adopted child, the policeman who killed 100 suspects, the lawyer who defends pornographers. Sometimes a great idea shows you something you took for granted (banter, bottled water or betting shops) from an entirely new angle. Sometimes it’s a story about ideas themselves, and how they have shaped the news we read every day: how globalisation turned sour, how statistics lost their power, how technology disrupted the truth.



We like to tell writers that a great story has to grab the reader, point out of the window and say: “Whoa! Look over there! Something important is happening!” We’re looking for stories that feel urgent to this moment, that can be informative and definitive – but also for stories that are astonishing, unexpected, and entertaining.



Of course, the idea is only the beginning. The next step is another meeting – or a phone call – to talk about how to tell the story. Or, as we like to say, what’s actually going to happen inside this story? You’ve got 5,000 words: what’s going in the first section? What happens in the middle? How does it end? Is there one main character? Or many separate scenes? Is it about one big idea, or one main character? Does it proceed chronologically, or start in the present and flash back to the past?

We often ask the writer to produce an outline that sketches how they envision the piece, and then they start reporting. We ask them to produce a more detailed outline before they begin writing so that we can discuss the best way to marshal the material into a first draft. After the first draft, there’s usually another meeting – and then a second draft, and often a third, sometimes a fourth, a fifth. You get the picture.



At the end of all this, there are three pages in the newspaper or 5,000 words on your phone, right next to all the other news and features and culture and sport. When we started, there was still some scepticism about whether digital readers would make time for stories of this sort – or whether there was a large audience for deeply reported and intensively edited pieces about big ideas and unexpected topics. But three years later, it turns out that readers (and listeners) love the sense of getting beneath the surface of something – getting the definitive story from a journalist who has done months of reporting on the subject.



As our editor, Katharine Viner, wrote in a 2016 Long Read, about how technology changed the media: “The journalism that people value the most is that for which they can tell someone has put in a lot of work – where they can feel the effort that has been expended on their behalf, over tasks big or small, important or entertaining.” So that’s what we do.

