Two-Minute Magazines #3: The Long Good Read

This week’s magazine is a bit of an experiment. The Long Good Read is a publishing project by Dan Catt, the Guardian and Newspaper Club – it sucks up the most popular Guardian stories, flows them into Newspaper Club templates, then prints them for people to pick up for free at the Guardian’s coffee shop in Shoreditch.

Almost all of it happens without humans getting their hands dirty (I might not have made that crystal clear in the video) and for the most part it works really well. It’s kind of strange reading the Guardian’s most-read bits gathered together in print – that sort of aggregation is something I expect a website to do as a matter of course, but in print it’s an unusual experience. I like it.

And it’s interesting that it’s the infographics that suffer the most from the automation process – they’re notoriously difficult to do well at the best of times, and while there’s plenty of data on show here, it’s the artistry that’s missing. Hooray for humans.

Two-Minute Magazines #3: The Long Good Read from Steven Watson on Vimeo.