Some site updates: bug fixes and a question

If you've been reading the site on a phone, you may have noticed a change in how the site looks in the last few days. For larger screens, I've been mostly quite happy with the solution I've arrived at that shows "Featured" posts on one side of the screen, and "Quick Hits", or the stuff that's not necessarily so long or which more ties into the current cycle, on the other.

On phones, however, the two columns can't fit and so "quick hits" slid below "featured posts," meaning you couldn't even see that there was new content there without scrolling past all the featured stuff. That was a bug. I've fixed it so that on small screens, those two columns go away and instead you get just one column that lists all the stories mixed together, ordered by whatever's the most recent arrival. It should be much nicer to use now—no more pointless scrolling. There's been a few other bug fixes but hopefully nothing too noticeable.

Now for the question. Or rather, the conundrum.

When I first envisioned the split between "featured" and "non-featured" stories, the problem I was focused on solving was keeping the focus of the site on longform and evergreen-ish writing of the sort that may take significant time to produce, but still recognizing the day-to-day grind of the news cycle and the need to address that news-of-the-day.

Or, to put it another way: "Featured" stories mean "magazine-style" stories. They're generally a bit longer, they're generally focused on drilling down on a particular thought or topic. "Not featured" stories are more "newspaper-style" stories. They're generally but not always briefer, and they're typically focused on a current news event—meaning they have a shorter shelf life, of a sorts. We all might want to talk about the latest Somebody Said A Thing, but it's almost certain that Somebody Said A Thing is a one or two or three day story, not one people will be interested in reading next week or next month.

Featured stories are stories that are meant to have a longer shelf life. You should be able to come back to them in a month, like picking up a magazine, and say "yep, this still has relevance." The news cycle posts—and in combing through all my old stories to ponder what this site ought to focus on, I can tell you that the vast majority of them were so tied to a given news cycle as to be either uninteresting or indecipherable out of their original context—are fun to talk about but we're not really invested in them in the same way, right?

But here's where I made an error. For lack of a better idea, I chose "quick hits" as the name for those catch-all posts because I presumed, in general, that the breakdown between the two sides would largely amount to "long" posts and "short" posts. That was a guess, and it was a wrong one. There's plenty of news-cycle-dependent stories that have to be a bit long because there's a lot to them, and there's some vital not-news-cycle related stuff that can still be short and snappy. It's not about "quick."

So ... how should we make this distinction, then? What should we call it? I hesitate to just call it "In The News" because that, too, feels like it's not accurately describing what the content divide should be. But I know "Quick Hits" is the wrong phrase to use, so ... suggestions? What's a phrase that cleanly conveys the difference between "read this if you want something that will still be just as fun to read next week" versus "read this if you want smaller bites, or news-cycle-focused, or just fun little tidbits that we can all laugh about and move on?"