Michael Kinsley, Atlantic columnist and editor of a soon-to-be launched Atlantic Media site, wrote an article – published on the Atlantic website — under the heading “Newspaper articles are too long.”
Kinsley argues that readers are abandoning print for online because of brevity, not necessarily technology.
He points to a couple of recent print articles – from the New York Times and Washington Post – on healthcare reform, noting their word counts (Times: 1,456; Post: 1,500) and promptly tears them apart for unnecessary verbiage.
The irony here, of course, is it took Kinsley needed 1,820 words to make his argument, when – as Peter Kafka notes — he could’ve made it in, like, 20.
