‘The New Yorker’ Using Facebook to Attract Long-Form Fans

If you like The New Yorker, then you’re already getting the magazine and reading it’s stories, which are far wordier than most stories being published in major magazines today. (And in many cases far better. Seriously, The New Yorker can be unbelievably great at times.)

If you “like” The New Yorker, for a limited time, you can read a 12,000-word story by Jonathan Franzen (author of The Corrections and Freedom) titled “Farther Away” on Facebook. Content from The New Yorker is usually behind a paywall.

“We would much rather have a few thousand fans who really enjoy the content and stick with it,” New Yorker spokesperson Alexa Cassanos told Poynter.org, which makes sense. But after the reading the Poynter story, it sounds like there might not be a concrete way of leveraging this move with some sort of next step to keep new fans or gain even more readers at this point.

Either way, we say like it, love it, go old-school and subscribe to the hard copy.

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