Episode 495: On Being Merciless with Peter Rubin of Longreads – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

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“When I came in [to Longreads], I didn’t come in and say, I think we need to grow aggressively. I said, ‘Let’s figure out who we are. Let’s figure out what other people aren’t doing, that we do , and that we can do better.’ And so the only real thing that changed when I first came in was to try to make the editors known quantities.” — Peter Rubin, head of publishing at Automattic, where he works primarily with Longreads, but also The Atavist Magazine.

Today we have Peter Rubin (@provenself). He’s got two websites, one with a bit more flavor, one a bit more “professional,” his words, not mine. He is head of publishing at Automattic, where he works primarily with Longreads.com, but also helps out his pals at the sister magazine, The Atavist, you may have heard of it.

He’s on the pod today to talk about a lot of things, but he’s also drumming up attention for a membership drive for longreads.com, a hub of curation for the best longreads on the web, first started by Mark Armstrong, he of Ep. 481 fame. Longreads has since gone onto publish original works of criticism, journalism, and personal essays and won a National Magazine Award for best digital illustration in 2020. In conjunction with with Oregon Public Broadcasting, they produced Bundville, the hit podcast that made Leah Sottile something of a household name (shoutout to her new season of Hush).

OK, so a little more about Peter: He spent many years at Wired Magazine and he’s also the author of Future Presence: How Virtual Reality is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life, which came out in 2018, but with Chat GPT going full porn for verified adult users (what could possibly go wrong?), Peter’s book seems oddly of the moment … also it’s only seven years old, but I guess in tech that’s like the stone age.

In this conversation we talk about:

Finding diamonds in the rough
How he cultivated his editor eye
Being merciless in the edit
Figuring out the new identity of Longreads when he took over in 2021
Curation
And the Longreads membership drive

Visit longreads.com to read more and to pony up … that’s what I’m going to do, for you people who think I get handouts, just know that I’m not that savvy.

Peter’s CNFin’ Snippets

“Journalism, for me, has always been about curiosity more than topic.”

“Sometimes it comes down to being merciless with yourself, by which I mean, it’s not kill your darlings. It’s is this bringing me through this piece? Is it bringing me through this argument? Is it bringing me through this story?”

“If I’m a fly on the wall, then it’s a notebook, especially if I could be somewhere unobtrusive, right? If my subject is doing something and I’m not with them, I want to capture everything that I’m thinking about them and the way they carry themselves, speech pattern, whatever it is. If I’m spending time with somebody, it was probably always a little foolhardy, but I always depended on the recorder, because you just put it and it recedes, and then it’s you and the person.”