In a Women’s Wear Daily interview conducted by Alexandra Steigrad, New Yorker EIC David Remnick reminds of something that is all but forgotten these days: During Web 1.0, the overwhelming consensus was that nobody wanted to read long articles (let alone books) on a computer screen, and they never would. I worked in some places that had 300-word limits on writing for this reason. It wasn’t mainly that there were slow downloads, rudimentary design and navigation and unwieldy devices (though all of that is true), but rather that industry professionals believed there was some neurological barrier to enjoying longreads online. It was like designing automobiles with the expectation that drivers would use them in their neighborhoods but never over great distances. Seems silly now, with certain adventurous readers devouring War and Peace on smartphones. Perhaps there was initially a neurological barrier, but if so we rewired our brains with repetition. An excerpt:

“WWD:

Is long-form journalism still alive and well?

David Remnick:

I think it’s absolutely alive and well. I was interested in the Web from the get-go. I used to get invited to digital events, knowing I was being invited as a Brontosaurus editor from an old media outlet, The New Yorker. I would go to these sessions with really smart people, usually in there 20s, and, at the time, I was in my 40s. There were evangelical tenets to what was true and what was not true, and one of the things that was thought to be 100 percent true was that no one would read anything long on the Internet. That turned out to be absolute nonsense. Some of the most widely read things for The New Yorker on the Web are [around] 10,000 or 25,000 words long. When I think about our future, it’s an encouraging thing to know that this is what we’ve been trying to be great at for a very long time.”