In the age of distraction, many of us have already bid farewell to our attention spans, succumbing instead to the endless drone of the chirps and chimes of texts, Twitter and …

Eh hem, sorry, I got distracted.

Let's face it: most people don't have the time nor the attention span to read "long-form" journalism (also known as narrative or literary journalism). Unlike hard news stories -- which answer the who/what/where/when/why of a story -- long-form pieces can run up to 8,000 words. There's even shorthand for being too short of time to read these pieces on the web – "tl;dr" or "too long, didn't read."

Though great long-form journalism does certainly exist on the web, the challenge is getting readers to sit down and read (sd;r??). (See Slate’s case for long-form journalism here.)

This week, Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore explored some new tools that aim to get us to read long-form journalism on the web, and the minds behind them. Driving traffic to long-form journalism via the web, Tenore concluded, "may give publishers more reasons to produce it."

Do you use any of these tools? If not, will you? Let us know what you think about them.