1. Narrative

Narrative journalism combines the standards and goals of journalistic reporting with the devices of literature. It doesn’t have to be long (or longform, if you prefer), but it does have to be story-like.

To put it another way, typical news reporting sticks the most important information in the first few paragraphs. Narrative journalism leaves the reader in suspense until the end. Journalists such as Ira Glass and David Finkel have perfected this art and have helped to popularize it.

Now, narrative journalism is everywhere. Newspapers, especially the Timeses of New York and Tampa Bay, continue to crank it out. New media projects have sprouted, including Epic, Serial and Narratively. Longform and Longreads have boomed mostly just for curating it.

Latterly will set itself apart in this space in two ways. First, it will be one of the only narrative magazines with an international scope targeting a global English-speaking audience. And second, Latterly will focus on stories that are newsworthy, but not necessarily in the news. We think readers have a larger bandwidth for international storytelling than many editors give them credit for.

2. Subcompact publishing

I used to subscribe to GQ because I liked reading one or two of the feature stories in the back. But I was paying for a lot of other stuff, like how to fold a pocket square, and the first dozen pages were ads.

The idea of subcompact publishing, elucidated here by my mentor at Compass Cultura, is probably the future of all publishing. Why should my subscription to The New York Times, for example, subsidize the food and sports sections I never touch?

Subcompact publishing tosses the fat and saves the lean cut — in Latterly’s case, four features per month — for a lower price.

3. Ad-free, reader supported

The cost of a Latterly subscription is $3 per month or $8 for three months. We’re still working out the details of how much access people get for free, but it won’t be much. Fortunately for us, more good journalism is going behind paywalls. Already, dozens of people have signed up for Latterly, proof that readers want to invest in the idea of quality journalism.

We’ve declared ourselves ad-free so emphatically because we want to avoid potentially corrupting commercial influence over our journalism. We also don’t like the idea of selling our readers’ attention to companies.

Instead, we’ll be accountable only to our community: namely, the subjects of our stories, the journalists who tell those stories and the subscribers who make it all possible. We will solicit feedback from everyone along the way and use it to make each month’s issue better than the last. Eventually, as others have done, we will publish our finances so anyone can see how we use each dollar.

Essentially, Latterly is crowd-funded journalism. To support the costs of the first few issues, we’re launching a Kickstarter campaign alongside our Nov. 18 launch. This will be our only seed money, and 100 percent of it will go into the pockets of our freelance writers and photographers.