‘Longform’ to share its last insight into world of journalism
NEW YORK — In 2012, Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky and Evan Ratliff decided to try their hand at a relatively untested form: podcasting. As editors and writers in their 30s who were navigating the churning waters of digital media, they wanted to understand how their favorite types of stories — long-form magazine articles — came together.
So they bought a microphone, placed it in the middle of a desk at their makeshift studio in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, which was really just a spare room in the office of The Atavist, a magazine Ratliff helped found, and invited journalists and narrative nonfiction writers to tell them about their work and their lives.
“Our expectations were pretty modest,” Lammer said, and they weren’t sure how many people would listen.
Over the next decade, their podcast, “Longform,” became required listening for aspiring and early-career writers who were eager to learn about how the people they looked up to — from veterans of legacy publications to bloggers at new media startups — made it to where they were. Listeners also tuned in to satisfy curiosities about the journalists whose bylines they saw again and again, as well as for inspiration and practical guidance.
George Saunders or Ta-Nehisi Coates might discuss how they discovered their writerly voices; Connie Walker or Lawrence Wright would detail how they approached reporting excursions; Elif Batuman or Vinson Cunningham would share their theories on narrative and criticism.
“‘Longform’ was like a cheat sheet, a master class in craft, a gauge of personal idiosyncrasy,” Hua Hsu, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his memoir “Stay True” and was a two-time guest on the show, wrote in an email. “At a time when journalism felt like a very beleaguered profession, and media in general seemed devalued, it provided little moments of uplift to hear people so committed to doing their work at such a high level.”
Along the way, “Longform” unwittingly captured the oscillations of a changing media industry — including pivots to video, the decline of print and waves of mass layoffs. Some of those shifts appeared to be reflected in the hosts’ announcement recently that after 12 years, they would soon record the last episode of the podcast.
“There will always be an audience for great stories,” Linsky, 43, said in an interview, “but there are more structural challenges to doing this work than there ever have been.”
Lammer, 42, added that long-form journalism “is labor-intensive, expensive and requires support” and that “it’s harder as a 20-something-year-old to get your first shot” than it was even five years ago.
While long-form features still frequently appear in legacy outlets like The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, as well as in smaller-scale literary publications like n+1 and The Drift, many have moved away from the form. California Sunday Magazine, which focused on long-form journalism over its six-year run, folded in 2020. In 2022, The Washington Post shut down its Sunday magazine. And this year, Condé Nast eliminated Pitchfork’s features department in the process of folding the music site into GQ.
The “Longform” hosts described a bleak media landscape but said it was not why they were ending their podcast. The hosts, all of whom live in New York City and now have children, pointed to new creative endeavors and family as reasons for the change.
“For most of my career people have been saying that long-form journalism was dying or already dead,” Ratliff, 49, said. “The show has never been about the industry as much as it’s been about the people.”
One of the founding tenets of “Longform,” Linsky added, was to “talk to people we were genuinely curious about.”
Among them was Jia Tolentino, a New Yorker staff writer who twice appeared on the podcast — most recently after the release of her debut essay collection, “Trick Mirror.” During their interview, she recalled, Linsky asked her a question she didn’t understand at first. “But then I thought, ‘Oh, this is the key to my entire work,’” she said.
Linsky and his co-hosts “are generous and instinctive in how they interview people, and they’re very perceptive readers,” Tolentino said, adding that she’s never been a fan of any “writing podcast” other than “Longform.”
The podcast’s nearly 600 episodes, which aired weekly, feature a who’s who of contemporary journalists and nonfiction writers, but the not-so-secret to the show’s success may have been its hosts.
“Aaron, Max and Evan are such nuanced readers, I was always excited to hear about what they picked up in someone’s work,” Hsu wrote. When Lammer interviewed him, he was impressed by how “he could draw on these little changes in my voice over time. It made me feel more like someone with a coherent body of work, rather than someone who’d just been hacking away all these years.”
Listeners learned to recognize the hosts’ different demeanors and interview styles — Lammer was jubilant and candid, Linsky more effusive and shrewd, and Ratliff somewhat stoic and staid. They typically alternated interviewing duties, sitting down with the guests with whom they had an affinity.
Although the media landscape looks different from how it did 12 years ago, Lammer said the trio could have hosted the show “forever, if we wanted to.”
“We like it, people appreciate it, and it’s very difficult to stop doing something under those circumstances,” he said.
Ratliff said he still had hundreds of writers and editors on his wish list for interview subjects, “including very young people and absolute classic ‘Longform’ guests who should’ve been on years ago.”
But as painful as it is to walk away from the platform they have built, the hosts decided this moment felt like the right time to call it quits.
Ratliff is starting a new podcast called “Shell Game” and will continue to write magazine pieces for Bloomberg Businessweek; Lammer plans to keep producing podcasts for other people and playing in Francis and the Lights, a band he is in with his childhood friend; Linsky said his goal was “to keep telling ambitious stories that mean something to people” but he was still formulating what that would look like.
“You just know when you’ve done enough, when the story’s done,” Linsky said. “At some point, you have to put the story down and move on to the next one, because you could tinker on it forever. There isn’t some scientific answer to when that point is — sometimes you just know.”