I have spent a goodly chunk of this week taking care of a family member who has been in and out of the hospital, so our lead story is a very mildly updated piece from a few years ago. I wrote “Lee Iacocca got lucky with the 1964-66 Ford Mustang” back when I was still doing a fair number of long-form articles. This one almost topped 5,100 words, which is rather big even for middle-brow magazines. I think that this particular story is one of my more substantive efforts, but it has generated relatively few page hits and comments.
My takeaway from that is most readers don’t want to read such long-winded pieces, so I have tried to keep more recent articles shorter. I am not trying to hit the top of the pop charts, but spending an extended amount of time on a story is not worth the effort if only a few people read it. Perhaps this style of writing is more appropriate for books than the Internet, where short and breezy seem to be the coin of the realm.
Has Twitter passed the point of no return?
Since we’re touching base on editorial matters, I should mention that Indie Auto is monitoring the shitshow that is Twitter but will continue to tweet for now (go here). I hope that Twitter does not disappear because I have found it to be a time-saving way of keeping track of huge amounts of information on a wide range of topics (albeit mostly non-automotive). Alas, I fear that Twitter’s point of no return may have been reached.
It will be interesting to see how much the chaos at Twitter impacts Tesla’s viability at a moment when legacy automakers are moving into the EV market. Will Elon Musk’s ambitious foray into social media become the historical equivalent of Kaiser-Frazer’s disastrous ramping up of production in 1949?
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
Today’s younger people don’t care to read long articles, if they even read at all! They have been habituated to shorter and shorter videos, witness TikTok. I have many auto magazines from the Fifties and early Sixties that featured technical articles that had several full pages of nothing but verbiage, not even a single picture in the mix. Those photos were usually in the lead pages.
I find it kind of amusing that my own Son rarely reads my blog, entries take only five minutes to read, and there aren’t many ( if any!) facts to digest!
Perhaps you could make a section that is more like an online magazine that features longer more scholarly articles. Either way, thanks for your hard work in producing a top notch and informative site.
You’re welcome, Jose. This is a good moment to give a shout out to your blog Better Beaters. You are a good storyteller who displays far more technical knowledge about cars that I will ever have.
On length of articles, my primary motivation for writing Indie Auto is to help advance automotive history. I also have a tendency to write long when left to my own devices. So perhaps the best compromise is to break up the longer stories but not turn them into info McNuggets.
I don’t mind the long form articles, although I think that some of them could effectively be broken up into chapters, possibly. With my own writing, I constantly fear that I will wander into some divergence of another adjacent topic and then end up with a long, rambling screed, much like this sentence. I do think it may take more than 2000 characters to describe a particular event or series of events. I never did a character count on my Mistubishi reply, but I know it’s a whopper.
On the other hand, I use YouTube for my work research. I feel that many YouTubers are making long winded videos (ostensibly) to allow more advertisements. This is a place where brevity should be important, as I’m sure I’m not the only one who wants to watch a 30-minute video regarding minor updates to software or equipment.
Regarding Twitter: When I lost my job in 2009, I was advised by some acquaintances I should get on all of the social media platforms to establish a “presence”. Twitter was one of those platforms, but I have been confused about it’s purpose ever since I joined. To me, Facebook and Linked In seem more clear about their purpose, but Twitter remains a mystery to me.
Upon the dawn of the internet in the 1990’s, someone said to me that it was the “CB radio of the 90’s” and would be a flash in the pan. When presented with the choices of social media platforms upon my entry in the late 00’s, I had no idea which ones to choose from and so, Twitter landed on the slate of options. However, even before the Musk acquisition, I felt that Twitter had become the “CB radio of the 2000-2020’s”.
Enterprising folks would start betting on a Twitter deathwatch right about now.