New wave of ‘Indielectual’ websites fight the quick-turn content culture

New York Observer
Kat Stoeffel describes how The Awl has spawned a new generation of websites that are placing their bets on long, interesting stories rather than quick-hit aggregation. Rookie magazine (aimed at teenage girls), The Classical (about sports and culture, coming soon), Thought Catalog (which says it will make readers more interesting) and the Los Angeles Review of Books (I’ll leave this one to you) are independent websites with distinct editorial visions. Awl publisher John Shankman says his site targets the “indielectual” audience. “That’s the big challenge for us, ‘How do we scale smart?’” he says. “What’s happened in a lot of entrepreneurial media companies is they sacrifice quality for the sake of growth. … We’re not falling victim to that.” On Thought Catalog, Stoeffel writes, “contributors share their articles, and comments often rival the posts themselves in length, driving the kind of writing-as-group-therapy social traffic more akin to Tumblr’s shallow reflecting pool than the competitive, reverse-chronological stream of Twitter- or news-driven blogs.” || Earlier: David Carr describes how The Awl created a business with its “little digital boutique“