When Wired.com editor Joe Brown posted his first images on Instagram, in 2010, he had to snap photos on his Android and transfer them to his iPad just to be able to upload to the platform. Over the last five years, Instagram has evolved from an app that could make your photos look like boxy polaroids to a publishing machine with more than 400 million users. And as part of that evolution, Instagram is no longer a place just for images and hashtags—it’s fast becoming a home for longform journalism.
In early November, Wired became one of the first major publications to debut a longform story exclusively on Instagram.1 “Left Behind in a High-Speech World,” which follows a man who teaches rural Mississippians about the value of being online, was released as a series of 11 Instagram posts that combined stunning photography with long passages of text included in the captions. (Mississippi ranks last in the country for high-speed household Internet access.) As part of a package on equality in the digital age, writer W. Ralph Eubanks not only profiles the teacher, but also shapes the story as part memoir and history, which was challenging for the design department to illustrate.
Instead of giving the piece a standard treatment, photo editor Sarah Silberg asked photographer Tabitha Soren to capture mostly atmospheric shots. “We wanted to set the scene for the story to take place in,” Silberg explained over the phone.
When the photos came back, it didn’t seem right to shoehorn them into a magazine format. “They were all so powerful, it felt strange to make some of them small and some of them big,” Brown explained. “As we do at Wired right now, you assign a featured story and you figure out the best platform for it once it comes in. Usually that’s a choice between the magazine, the digital edition, the website, and video. But in this case, we were lucky that the story itself asked to be on Instagram.”
[01/11] LEFT BEHIND IN A HIGH-SPEED WORLD: This summer, as part of a special package on equality in the digital age, we sent writer W. Ralph Eubanks and photographer Tabitha Soren to Mississippi, the American state that ranks last in high-speed household Internet access. Rather than come back with a dry dispatch on the digital divide, Ralph and Tabitha brought us a deeply personal examination of what it means to be technologically isolated in today’s America. You can only read it here; for now, we’re releasing this feature story exclusively on Instagram. (<img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/72x72/1f4f7.png" alt="