Most newspaper stories are still too long

Newsosaur reporting:

The news cognoscenti gasped when the Columbia Journalism Review recently reported that the nation’s leading newspapers aren’t writing as many long stories as they used to. But I think most stories are still way too windy.

In a moment, I’ll tell you why, as briefly as I can. First the background: 

Tallying yarns topping 2,000 words on Factiva, CJR found the number of long-form stories at the Los Angeles Times dropped by 86% between 2003 and 2012.  In the same period, stories of similar heft fell by 50% at the Washington Post, 35% at the Wall Street Journal and 25% at the New York Times.

“When it comes to stories longer than 3,000 words, three papers showed even sharper declines,” said CJR. The number of super-sized stories dropped everywhere but the NYT, which actually had a 32% increase in articles of 3,000 words or more.  Remember the epic Snowfall?

The reasons for what CJR called a “meltdown” in long-form journalism are well known:  Skinnier news holes, shrinking staffs and more digital chores for slimmed-down staffs to perform – 24/7, if you please. 

But the constraints of the modern publishing business actually may be a bad thing that’s a good thing for newspapers laboring to sustain their relevance and utility for the time-constrained multi-taskers also known as their remaining readers.

With all due respect to my colleagues and friends in the business, newspapers are written by journalists for journalists, who not only love their words but also tend to equate the length of a story with the importance of the subject, if not the writers themselves....
http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2013/01/most-newspaper-stories-are-still-too.html