Making artful journalism: How Long Lead is rejecting clicks in favor of craft

I went to Syracuse, I went to their magazine program. I was taught there’s a three-legged stool. You have design, you have art and you have editorial. Those three things together produce a feature. And that's exactly what we're doing. We’re not changing that formula. We’re coming back to it.”

John Patrick Pullen, founding editor, Long Lead

When journalism is done well, it becomes more than just an article — more than a story, a photo, a video, audio or even a project. When journalism is done well and beautifully, with all of its parts coming together, it becomes art.

At least that’s how Bill Perkins, co-founder of a young media outlet called Long Lead, views it.

Long Lead, which bills itself as a journalism studio, reserves a seat for multimedia deep dives and longform journalism. It’s a place where the story dictates the medium.

Long Lead is intentionally bucking the journalism status quo, refusing — at least so far — to chase algorithms and dollars. It does not regurgitate clickbait. It does not bend to the whims of platforms. It rejects the journalism rat race geared toward immediacy, political whiplash and short attention spans.

The engine that powers Long Lead is fueled by depth, quality and originality.

Conveying facts to other people, "I think that's an art form, right?" Perkins, a hedge fund manager who is financially supporting Long Lead, said in a recent interview. "I was collecting art — like paintings and stuff — and one of my artist and collector friends told me that a collector signals to future generations what is worth preserving. So, what you see in museums are the things that people collected and commissioned in their homes and what they purchased. You might not necessarily have the best art that existed 1,000 years ago or five years ago. You have what people have collected and what they have signaled as valuable. Those end up in museums, signaling to the world that this is important.

Garrett Graff, historian, journalist and Pulitizer finalist who hosts Long Lead’s award-winning “Long Shadow” podcast (Photo credit: Elman Studio)

“And so, I think this is our flare, our signal that this is important: the style, this format, for future generations. And I hope that other editors and publishers see that, and they either replicate it or carry it on.”

Perkins helped get Long Lead off the ground, but the day-to-day leadership for the studio comes from Founding Editor John Patrick Pullen, who has previously worked for Time and Fortune magazines. Pullen is one of four employees who work for Long Lead, which relies heavily on freelancers to pitch their projects. Long Lead prides itself on paying well for the work it seeks.

Long Lead in May won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for its production of the podcast “Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust.” The podcast, one of the most popular history podcasts in the country, is one example of journalistic explorations produced by Long Lead. The show is hosted by Garrett Graff, a historian, journalist and Pulitzer finalist who comes from a family of journalists. The project began with a historical investigation into the events and particulars of the 9/11 attack, including lesser-known aspects, such as jurisdictional issues related to building codes. These issues allowed builders of the Twin Towers to sidestep wrapping steel beams in flame-retardant materials, a skipped detail that may have prevented the towers from collapsing.

By the third season of “Long Shadow,” Graff examined the nation’s gun culture in the 25 years since the Columbine High School mass shooting. Graff has since completed a fourth season, this one titled “Breaking the Internet,” to answer the questions of why the internet has evolved into what it is today.

Long Lead embraces journalists of all kinds: writers, photographers and filmmakers.

“Every other outlet, what they do is they invest in a CMS, and as a journalist, you will write for it, you’ll submit your 1,100-word story, and they’ll say, ‘Cool. We can only include 800 words’ due to the ad breaks and other factors. They take your work, and they jam it in there. And it’s less than ideal. What we do is we get a pitch from a journalist. We’re networking with journalists. They have ideas. They bring them to us. Let’s say the journalist is exceptionally skilled at writing profiles. We’ll look at it and go, ‘This isn’t a profile. This is a data story. Let’s give you access to other resources, such as data journalists or illustrators, and we’ll build the infrastructure around the story to support it, rather than trying to fit it into an existing infrastructure that doesn’t quite fit.’

“So that’s how we end up working. With photo essays, podcasts and multimedia that include documentaries, these stories require different presentation methods. Now, can anyone else do that? I suppose they could, but they’re not set up. They don’t think of their products in that way. They think of them as disposable.”

Among the projects funded and published by Long Lead include “An Unnatural Disaster” about the long, slow collapse of Haiti’s government in the wake of a devastating earthquake, and how its trapped citizens are fighting to reclaim their lives. 

In July, Long Lead began releasing a series of articles and photos of Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II — another deep dive into an event in America’s history.

Another project titled “Home of the Brave” reports on how Los Angeles has become the homeless veteran capital of America, where 4,000 veterans sleep on the streets every night. The exposé, presented in a scrollable, image-rich format, details how hundreds of acres of donated land, once housing thousands of veterans, were reduced to little more than a parking lot and a tent city. The project's byline includes seven journalists, including Pullen. The project won more than 15 awards.

Long Lead has published a six-part series on the use and effects of rubber bullets, bean-bag rounds and other crowd-control devices. The reporting by Linda Rodruguez McRobbie detailed the history of these munitions, but also the long-term effects, including traumatic brain injuries, blindness, PTSD and deaths.

During an interview in July, Pullen said Long Lead was on the cusp of releasing a series of articles and photos of Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II.

“I went to Syracuse, I went to their magazine program,” Pullen said. “I was taught there’s a three-legged stool. You have design, you have art and you have editorial. Those three things together produce a feature. And that's exactly what we're doing. We’re not changing that formula. We’re coming back to it. And my argument to anyone who will listen is that we need to be providing this. This is why people don’t engage with media: because the media sucks. It’s not worth engaging with. We’re not giving them anything they want to hold on to.

“I would say that Long Lead is a hedge against AI. Everything that we do is practically by hand.”

Long Lead launched in 2020 when Pullen connected with Perkins. Pullen said Perkins felt that the business model of an attention-grabbing approach to journalism had led to inferior journalism quality. One of the first stories published was a literal deep dive: an in-depth profile on a free-diving woman setting out to break a record.

Pullen connected with Graff through a direct message conversation on Twitter, which led to the Long Shadow podcast.

“His conversation was basically like, 'What is the most ambitious thing that you want to do that you haven’t found any place to do it yet?” Graff said about the initial conversations. “I had published this book in 2019; it was called ‘The Only Plane in the Sky,’ which was an oral history of 9-11. And I was like, ‘Look, the 20th anniversary of 9-11 is coming up, and I’ve never done a podcast before, but I’m interested in doing a podcast that is sort of every episode looking at an unanswered or lingering question from 9-11, timed to the 20th anniversary.

“We did this awesome first season of Long Shadow that was a huge hit in 2021; it went to No. 1 in the Apple History podcast series category, and we’re like, OK, this actually worked, and it was fun and interesting. We did some great work, and that has evolved into the annual podcast we’ve been producing ever since. … Every year, we try to take a public policy issue in American life and use history to explain how we got to now, and why America is the way that it is today.

“And I think that is exactly the promise that Long Lead offers, which is giving journalists all the time and space and resources that they need to do their highest quality and most impactful work. And I feel incredibly lucky to have landed here for this series and project, never once thinking that a random Twitter DM would lead to five years of working together.”

Long Lead is a bit of a “Field of Dreams” for journalism. It’s still a concept in search of a business model. In interviews, leadership didn’t let on much about how Long Lead would be funded in the long term. For now, it's a studio and place that gives support and space for high-quality journalism. For now, it’s about collecting great work to signal to future generations that this work is important.

Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.