Why not just read for the pleasure of it? Do you every read anything from The New Yorker, or Esquire, or The Atlantic, etc.? There can be great stories that are enjoyable to read, while still being nonfiction.
No, I think GP is right. Compare a typical long-form piece to e.g. a textbook. A well-written textbook has much more information, but still organizes it in such a way so that you can quickly understand what you're getting into. By comparison, I find that long-form journalism typically buries this information so that even if there is a meaningful summary, you have to build it yourself (and obviously you can only do this after having spent the time to read it in the first place).
My point is that long-form journalism isn't pleasurable to read. The writing style is incredibly belabored, and I am fairly convinced that this is the intention of the authors. It clearly works for many readers, but not for me, and I wish there was always a clearer upfront distinction between traditional news articles and long-form articles.
English is my second language, and while I'm able to skim and read text very quickly, increased use of literary vocabulary puts me off very quickly. It feels like pulling the hand brake. These articles are that much more tiresome to read. Also the longer, convoluted arguments force me to read the thing word by word until I can get the gist.
Once I discover it's in fact a long-form article, I will space bar-skim to see if there is any merit, and stop reading in 99% of cases.
I read lots of novels for the sheer pleasure of it. But reading the news is different. I don't read it for the same reason I read novels; I read it because I want to find out what's going, and because learning interesting things is fun. I too find writing styles that don't optimize for those purposes in the news to be infuriating, and I agree with baddox that I would much rather read Wikipedia articles (of which I have read many, for hours on end) than meandering news stories.
