NOTE:<\/strong> Originally published on Online Journalism Review: http:\/\/www.ojr.org\/ojr\/people\/webjournalist\/201104\/1968\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

There are those that blame the digital age and the Internet as the cause of our short attention spans and disinterest in longform storytelling. Then there are those that embrace the technology and develop tools or a platform that harnesses the tech to not only coexist with longform narrative, but also advance it.<\/p>\n

For this week\u2019s post, I spoke with Evan Ratliff<\/a>, freelancer for publications like Wired<\/a>, The New Yorker<\/a>, and others, turned digital entrepreneur and \u2013 if you believe some of the press \u2013 possible savior of the longform narrative with his new project, The Atavist<\/a>.<\/p>\n

NOTE: We met on a collaborative document and you can playback our unedited conversation here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>Evan, thank you for taking the time to “meet” for a quick chat about the project you are working on.<\/strong><\/p>\n

My pleasure!<\/p>\n

So, let’s start there… can you describe what The Atavist is?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sure, so The Atavist is a kind of hybrid publication: We sit right in between magazines and books. From the magazine angle, what we do is called “longform nonfiction” or “longform journalism:” We produce stories that are 6-7,000 words and up, all the way to maybe 30-35,000. All nonfiction, all written by people who have spent weeks or months reporting them. They are published digitally, through our app for iPad\/iPhone, through Kindle (Kindle Singles, which we can talk about), and Nook. From the book perspective, they are almost like short ebooks. <\/p>\n

We also license our software, but that’s our more non-journalism side of things so maybe less of interest here.<\/p>\n

How did this idea come about? You have a background in longform storytelling… but how did the idea of an app and this “concept” of a custom storytelling platform come about?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It started with a pretty basic, and unformed, idea: Was there some way to do longform writing\/journalism online. It was an idea I’d been thinking about for a while, but not doing much if anything about — I applied for a Knight foundation grant but didn’t get it, in maybe 2008 (2007? Can’t remember). Anyway, originally Nick Thompson<\/a>, my editor at Wired, and I were just saying that there must be some way to do longform that was more designed for the digital world. Instead of just translated straight from a magazine. The real conceptual ideas of how it might work didn’t come about until we sat down with our other partner, Jefferson Rabb<\/a>, who has both the design sensibility and coding chops to actually conceive what something like that might look like. It was in talking to him that we stopped talking about the Web and started talking about an app. <\/p>\n

Technically speaking, you could do these custom, interactive stories on the Web… what made it appealing on the iPad, Kindle, etc.?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that first, we just wanted to kind of get away from the idea of people reading it at their desktop, where they are skipping from one bit of information to the next all day. The emergence of phones\u2014and actually we first were looking just at smart phones, noticing how much we and other people were reading on them\u2014and then tablets, ereaders, etc, pointed a way to a different kind of digital reading experience. Marketing types now call it the “lean back” experience, which I don’t cotton to that much but the point is the same one we were going for: this is a different kind of reading than you do on the Web. <\/p>\n

Full disclosure, I think the concept and platform is a fantastic idea… and it’s an ideal mashup of interactive\/digital and traditional storytelling. I’ll embed the video from the site, but can you briefly list the features\/media\/interactivity\/etc. a user would find in a “typical” Altavist story?<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, I should probably first offer the caveat that of course you get different versions of Atavist stories in different environments. On Kindle\u2014for the moment\u2014you’ll get just the full text of the story, and photos, maybe some footnotes. In our app, the standard features are a bit different, just because we are able to control the whole environment and use multimedia however seems to suit. The standard features on every story in the app are: the text and full page photos (of course), an audiobook version of the story (you can flip back and forth between reading and listening), usually some elements of other media (music, video, woven into the narrative), and then what we call inline extras: Parts of the story that serve as a kind of substrate. These are links to characters, photo galleries, maps, timelines, audio clips that you can turn on and off. If they are on, you tap a word or phrase and the feature pops up. <\/p>\n