Going Longform

The original FKN format is a short satirical news bulletin. The 2006 episodes average just under five minutes; by the Bush-Iraq years the show is tighter, more confident, and shorter — the 2011 median bottoms out at 2.6 minutes. The whole point of the form is brevity: a few headlines, a few catchphrases, out.

That format ends in the late 2010s. The 2020 cohort jumps to a 51-minute median (only nine items in that year, but every single one of them is a long-form upload). 2023 settles at 8 minutes. By 2026 the median is back up at 28 minutes.

Three things are visible in the data. The first is the music pivot, covered in the previous essay — full sets and album-length compilations are longer by definition. The second is the live-gig back-catalogue: Deek Jackson Live @ Mhor84 (180 minutes), The Blues Muthaz Live at Mhor84 (184 minutes), Deek Jackson & Greg Wilson live Mhor84 27/7/23 (189 minutes). These five longest items in the whole catalogue are all 2023-24 venue uploads. They alone shift the mean by an order of magnitude.

The third is harder to pin to data but consistent with the rest. The whole online-video ecosystem moved longer in the same window — YouTube’s algorithm rewards watch-time, Spotify built podcast tooling, Patreon and Substack normalised paid long-form, the "ten-minute video" became the "fifty-minute video" became the "two-hour conversation" across the entire platform. A channel that survives this shift survives by getting longer.

The four-minute bulletin is not dead — there are still short newz drops scattered through the recent uploads — but it is no longer the format that defines the channel. What used to be a satirical news segment is now closer to a Scottish-counterculture variety show: news bits, full song performances, recorded gigs, retrospective uploads, and occasional sales pitches, distributed continuously, mostly on YouTube. The median runtime went up because the unit of work changed.