The SNO Report: See The Long Form Story Page Template In Action
Year after year, the Story Page Excellence badge (one of the six you need to earn SNO Distinguished Site status, for which you can enter here) proves elusive to even the best newspaper staffs. Why? More often than not, it’s about the long form template.
Eventually, it clicks for everyone and they earn the badge. Just your luck, we’ve spotted a few long form templates out in the wild that are excellent, that you can use as helpful references. 
From West Side Story, Iowa City West H.S.
A group of reporters set out to tell, “The stories of foreign students finding a new home in the United States.” It makes for a good example of using the long form template to string together a few separate, in-depth interviews about the same type of experience into one long feature — and you can use the Long Form template to establish clear separation between sections.
They’ve created a super-clean, consistent design on the page. They threw a changeup using vertical featured images for each Long Form Chapter and it really makes the page pop. Each “chapter” is consistently put together — each with a large featured image, a second photo embedded, one pull quote and a related stories box. Each section has a different related story suggestion — drive that traffic!
Low key, theirs is also a good example of when you can get away with not displaying the primary featured image on the story page.
From The Harbinger, Algonquin Regional H.S.
Writing about “Vape Culture,” as this article is titled, is trending this school year. We’ve seen a lot of different versions of the same story — especially coming through the Best of SNO log — but this one really makes an impact because of its appearance and all the extras.
Notice how they’ve utilized the Long Form options from the SNO Design Options page, which allows you to put this story page template against a different colored background (off-black, in this case) than other stories. It goes really well with the lead photo, too.
The variations in text color, style and size makes the page pop, too. They’re using sidebars at an expert level, so well that there’s no sense that other photos are needed, as you’d traditionally hope for, to break up all that text. This example is pretty striking.
From The Sunflower, Wichita State University
It’s another excellent example of a story fitting the template, with staffers 
of The Sunflower reviewing a chain of events related to the university threatening to take away its funding because of its displeasure with stories the staff has covered. Content-wise, it’s a statement as to why journalism is important.
It’s separated into chapters, each with several headings within them to separate parts of that section, and it utilizes a good opening introduction in the Long Form Container — a good way to use that part of the template.
Also, notice the custom graphic they created for the series. There’s a lesson in it: When at first there’s not an obvious photo to get, create a graphic.
Think you have a good example the long form usage? Share it with the SNO community here.