Chart of the week: Long form readers value trusted media sources

This kind of text is different from the bite-sized content on the web in many ways.

To evaluate its specific characteristics, a study, funded by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, looked at how 63 self-identified long form readers found and read 1,349 long stories over the course of 21 days.

One of the survey’s main findings is that trust plays a major role in the spreading of long reads.

Long form reads (Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism / Statista)

This chart, provided by Statista, visualises that readers are more likely to invest their time in a story that comes from a media outlet they know rather than one they don’t. The conclusion from the survey concludes that curation is an essential component of how long form gets read, with the curators being either editors at media outlets the reader trusts, or friends.

Download the chart from FIPP Insight

More from Statista, the statistics portal

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