Thanks to smartphones, we’re now in the golden age of reading

• Max Souffriau
• What makes Chris Hughes qualified to talk about technology? Nothing really—he just helped create Facebook.

If you tune in at all to the near-constant chatter about the precarious state of quality journalism, you’ve probably heard that the digital revolution is largely to blame for quality journalism’s decline—that publishers beholden to smartphones and social networks are guilty of rewarding consumers with short attention spans, and that, as a result, those attention spans continue to shrink.

How, then, does the Reader ethos fit into the brave new world of digital news consumption? Conventional wisdom might hold that a 41-year-old publication that once printed a 20,000-word story about beekeeping is in trouble. It would seem that the smartphone and the social networks are killing our soul. They’re not. In fact, they might save it.