Michael Kinsley of The Atlantic has one theory as to why newspapers are dying like the dinosaurs. Kinsley blames length. Here’s a part of his article entitled “Cut the Story.”
One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.
This is something I completely agree with. In today’s information age long copy makes my eyes hurt. If I want to read something longer than a page I’ll pick up a magazine, but certainly not a newspaper. One huge mistake many journalists make is that blogs are the same as newspapers. The moment I see a blog with tons of copy I run for the hills. There are too many well written blogs out there that get to the point.
I’m sure there’s a niche out there somewhere for really long blogs, but there’s a niche for everything. The average American doesn’t have time to read a long entry. What I love about blogs is that information is summarized in a very easy-to-read fashion. It allows me to read tons of different sites on tons of different topics.
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