Rieder: A massive treatise on computer code goes viral

I'm not sure this sounds like a recipe for clickbait in a world where celebrities, silliness and sleaze often dominate.

Let's write a story about computer code and how computers work. Let's do it long form. And not just kind of long form. Seriously long form. Let's do a piece that in effect decodes an entire civilization. Oh, and if it's 38,000 words, no problem.

That's what Bloomberg Businessweek did. Code: An Essay was the only article in the magazine's June 12 print edition. It's the magazine's top-selling issue this year. The digital version, What Is Code, was posted the day before. And it went off the charts.

What Is Code has attracted more unique visitors and page views than anything else posted on Bloomberg Business, a site combining the former Bloomberg.com and Businessweek.comthat launched January 27. More traffic than any breathless report on the latest alarming drop or exhilarating leap by the markets. And committed traffic: For the first two weeks, it logged more minutes from individual readers than anything on the site had before. (The company doesn't release specific traffic numbers.)

Writer Paul Ford's piece also has attracted lots of admiring tweets, including one from Bill Gates, no less -- "Paul Ford skillfully captures how code runs our lives." -- as well as a very nice appreciation by Gabriel Arana on The Huffington Post.

The article was a graveyard smash for a very good reason: It is that well done. It's smart. It's engagingly written. It's accessible. And it has a wide array of digital bells and whistles that make it a truly immersive digital experience.

It also reflects a commitment to make sense of something than seems so mysterious and ghostly to so many of us, yet has so much importance in our lives.

All of which is great news for anyone who cares about quality journalism.

For quite awhile, the prevailing wisdom was that the digital era meant the demise of long form. Nobody wanted to read lengthy investigative pieces or narratives on a computer, not to mention a phone. Short attention spans were in. Depth was out.

But maybe not entirely.

In recent years, it has become clear that the ambitious enterprise piece can coexist with the listicle, the powerful investigative report can live in the Kardashians' world.

If that weren't the case, you wouldn't see BuzzFeed, which knows a little something about viral content, launching a long form unit.

There is, though, one major caveat: It has to be really, really good. If it's pedestrian or boring, who needs it? The bar is set pretty high in media landscape with so many choices.

Yet the opportunity is there.

"In a sea of short form, people are likely to seek out something that has depth," says Josh Tyrangiel, editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and Chief Content Officer for Bloomberg LP Editorial. Tyrangiel says longer articles often fare well on the site.

"The question is less about length than, 'Is it any good?' " he says.

So how did What Is Code come about? Like so many stories, thanks to an editor's whim. While Tyrangiel, a onetime editor of Time.com, has been around digital journalism for more than a decade, he realized there was a lot about the way computers work that he didn't quite get. And he figured he had a lot of company.

"It's an important business issue," he says. "A lot of people are ignorant of the costs involved and the opportunities involved."

And so he asked Ford to explain it to him. What began as a story of a couple of thousand worlds morphed into a monster.

"We decided we might as well go all in," Tyrangiel says. Was there ever a sense that it was too much? "Oh, no, it was, 'Let's do more.' "

I'm a long form guy. I once read a 22,000-word profile of Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer on a phone. (My colleague Roger Yu is not the only person to suggest that this was a desperate cry for help.) Yet even I found the length of What Is Code? daunting. At the same time, I totally applaud the bold effort to tell the entire story. Apparently I'm not alone.

And to answer your question: What did What Is Code? displace as the site's all-time champion? It was the April 27 ditty, The Best and Worst Fonts to Use on Your Résumé.