The genre of the longread: A sociolinguistic aspect

Nowadays some experts call the multimedia longread the heir of the traditional journalistic genres. The longread successfully combines texts, illustrations, video materials and other elements aimed to attract the reader and holding their attention. The complicated longread in the Internet media is opposed to the short and simple shortread which occupies the main place in the information flow of modern people. The experts are alarming about the declining interest in reading long texts (primarily books) among young people. That is why it is becoming necessary to study the attitude to longreads among this age group of Russians. For this purpose, a survey was conducted among 121 students of Russian universities, who measured the length of the texts they read in the Internet media during one week. The results of the survey revealed that 67% of the respondents do read longreads during the week. The survey also revealed two main reasons that prompted the interviewees to read them: significant motivation (educational process or first job compelled young people to look for answers in texts) and the attractiveness of articles written so well that reading them was not difficult or boring for this age group. At the same time, the main reasons for rejection were identified as being related to the quality of the texts themselves (vague wording, unclear structure), as well as inconvenient formatting (young people prefer to read texts via mobile devices).

genre, multimedia format, longread, journalistic genres, youth audience, survey