A 1982 double murder and two men accused, convicted, and exonerated of the crime
read.atavist.com
read.atavist.com
I slogged through it. I enjoy long format pieces when the author has some sort of clear narrative. In this case, however, I feel a bit more outlining wouldn't have hurt things. Several times I felt as if both the author and I were bumping into things without knowing why they were there in the text -- and we interpreted those things differently. Editorializing is fine, just cop to it in the first few graphs.
Structurally, it was a worthy effort. Thematically, it should have collapsed into a semi-long format opinion piece. I grow a bit tired of the New Yorker format of showing me an explosion, then cutting to a small bug crawling up a blade of grass. I know I'm in for an hour of reading before I get back to the explosion. Meanwhile the author is trying to make a point, but is too coy to just come out and say it.
For those of you without the time, here's my tl;dr
1) Chicago is a deeply corrupt city. Everything is politics.
2) Lots of convictions have happened on less than solid grounds. Over the last 20 years or so, folks have starting making names for themselves by getting innocent men freed.
3) The problem here, as we've learned over and over again with the criminal justice system, is that if you poke at a case long enough, it starts to look shaky and broken. Even if it wasn't.
4) This entire "was he guilty or not" game has become both a political football and the means by which people get rich, famous, and admired by others. That means it has little to do with what it's supposed to be about: whether the person was guilty or not.
5) There's a ton of background he-said, she-said detail on how one particular case came down. At the end the reader doesn't know any more about who killed a couple of people in 1982 than they did at the beginning. The author realizes it was never about that in the first place, which is how the article should have started.
This is probably the one thing that infuriates me about long form articles. At the end of reading a 15-20 minute article there's absolutely no pay-off, no conclusion and nothing worthwhile to take away from it.
[1]: http://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-163-matthew-shaer
I haven't studied the source to see whether Pocket conceivably could have parsed this correctly. But sites really need to make articles play nice with apps that reformat for readability. I tend to skip articles that don't transfer to Pocket (or Safari's readability mode) well. NYTimes is a particularly annoying offender.
Then there's a paragraph taking up another page. And NOW is the article, which fits into a fixed 800px wide container.
The "A" in the top right is an edgy animated menu instead of being A+ / A- to resize text which is what I thought it was.
- Make it fluid
- Cut any and all fluff
If I have to spend even the slightest effort to get to understand your layout or feel comfortable with the site, I just close it. I don't have that sort of time.
I hate all these new style article sites that are made just to justify the developers salary.
(I didn't mind it, much better than a bunch of other pages.)
the layout and color choices of this page make reading this unbearable.. they're distracting, annoying, and infuriating at the same time. please... for readers' sake.. stop designing pages like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Porter
It's an interesting story
this is a heavy article to begin with. i got frustrated with the horrid design before i got half way through and copied it into text editor without any styles
But you're right that there's a pretty good amount of contrast. It might be difficult for people with visual disabilities, but it's not low-contrast.