3 trends you might have missed in 2013

One of the most talked about pieces of journalism this year was "Invisible Child," a powerful 28,000-word story in the New York Times about child homelessness in New York City. Multi-part and acompanied online by video interviews, source notes and related documents, the piece was deeply reported and likely expensive to produce.

In a digital age rife with short attention spans and with media organizations cutting back on deeper reporting, its popularity may surprise some. But it shouldn't. 2013 saw the media, as well as the audiences who consume it, create more space and appreciation for narrative, expository and deeply reported storytelling – often referred to as “longform journalism.” But it's not just about word count. It's about depth and strong narrative, and more and more often, it's about multimedia and interactive storytelling.

For a few years now, sites like Longform.org and Longreads.com have been curating and building communities around these types of stories. They crowdsource stories with the #longreads hashtag, publish popular "best of" lists and partner with other media organizations on roundups by topic: crime reporting, foreign policy, civil rights and Obama's presidency, for example. And their popularity is growing. But since late 2012, we’ve also seen media organizations make bigger investments in creating longform in the first place – not just curating it.

Digital powerhouse Buzzfeed, best known for its curated listicles and gifs, hired a longform features editor last year. In March, it launched a BuzzReads "vertical" that editor Steve Kandell described as" Buzzfeed for people who are afraid of Buzzfeed." The website The Verge has done the same. And Byliner, which partners with prestigious authors to publish stories you can download, sometimes at a cost, reported more best-selling original releases than last year.

Last December, The New York Times published a now-famous multimedia feature, Snow Fall, that had its own "effect" in 2014 as other media outlets began making more expensive digital investments in longform pieces. From hard-hitting national security stories like The Guardian's "NSA Files Decoded" interactive to music profiles like Pitchfork's cover story on singer Janelle Monae, digital longform is on the rise. 

What’s behind the growth? Amidst the messiness of digital media's evolution, there’s a deeper appreciation and respect for quality and depth. That may be, in part, a yearning for the deep reporting of the past, but it’s also about the future, namely integrating digital innovation. Just earlier this month, Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism brought together powerhouse media personalities for a conference on the future of digital longform.

Longform's resurgence also has to do with elite brand association. People like to associate themselves with this more respected journalism. It showcases what many journalists and outlets believe to be their best work. But how often do people who say they've read a piece of longform actually finish it?

Some pieces have famously generated big traffic. Snowfall brought in more than 3.5 million pageviews in one week. But some of the most expensive and deeply reported pieces have done dismally when it comes to pageview traffic.

Not everyone is willing to invest the time to read a piece upwards of 1,500 words. So to help budget time, some outlets like Byliner and Slate give their readers an estimate of how long it might take to read a particular piece.

And not everyone is a fan of the term “longform.” Earlier this month Atlantic editor James Bennett railed against the "decaying" label in a column that had media abuzz. Why would anyone, he asked, “make a ripping yarn or an eye-popping profile sound like something you have to file to the IRS?” Still, he admitted it’s all the rage. Longform journalism, he wrote, “shows signs of an energy and imagination not seen since the heyday of New Journalism.”

In the 1950s, more than a third of private-sector workers were unionized. Today, it’s just 7 percent. But with the decline of unions, a new kind of labor movement has emerged. Some workers in retail and fast food – two low-wage industries that are traditionally non-union and have boomed since the financial crisis – have taken to the streets in the last year to protest their working conditions. Their tactics are different from worker protests of yore, and so are their demographics.

The labor movement of the 20th century was pioneered by white men with blue-collar jobs, like steelworkers, railroad workers and longshoremen. But the traditionally unionized sectors of manufacturing and construction have shrunk, just as the low-wage service industry has exploded – an industry dominated by women, many of them women of color. According to the advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities United, restaurants are the single largest employer of people of color, and people of color are also far more likely to work minimum-wage jobs. Many of the leaders of today's labor movement are also mothers. The median age of female fast-food workers (women make up two-thirds of the industry) is 32. 

What also makes these protests so different are the tactics. For the most part, retail and food services aren't unionized, so they aren't going on strike for days on end. They can't afford that. So instead, the workers coordinate strikes across a particular city, or even across the whole country, on a single day. The goal is to attract media attention to their cause, and embarrass their employers. They want higher wages (calling their pay "poverty wages") and an end to retaliation against workers who protest. While the unions are supporting these movements with organizing muscle, they emphasize that unionizing isn't their goal. 

And they show no sign of stopping. These low-wage industries have grown through and since the recession. More than 4 million Americans work as food and beverage servers, with an average hourly wage of $8.72. And almost 4.5 million Americans work as retail salespeople. Walmart employs 1.4 million workers in America alone. 

A year ago, few Americans had likely heard of metadata, let alone understood its importance. It's a techie idea, after all. Metadata is data about data. But this year it's come to refer to the data you create – knowingly or unknowingly – when you use technology.

Largely through disclosures by former National Security Administration contractor Edward Snowden about covert programs, the term has wriggled its way into the mainstream public discourse. Call your mom on her cell phone from your cell phone? You just created some metadata about both your locations, your phone serial numbers, how long you talked, when you called her and more. Email your boss from your smartphone and deem it "high priority"? That's metadata too. 

But even before Snowden's disclosures, metadata had another high-profile moment in the news. In late 2012, Vice Magazine published an iPhone photo of antivirus software developer John McAfee, who was then on the lam. But they neglected to remove the GPS coordinates embedded in the photo's metadata, which showed that he was in Guatemala near its border with Belize. McAfee was eventually deported back to the U.S.

People have also become more aware of how metadata is used to monetize them online. Businesses like Google, Facebook and Amazon collect information about your online habits to present more tailored ads and options in online transactions. On many occasions, this has chafed consumers.