Newspaper Stories are Too Long. Let's Fix Them.

Michael Kinsley wrote a column about why news stories should be shorter. It's really good.

Newspaper stories take too long to tell us what's new. Banal quotes from experts I've never heard of don't help. Windy introductions to set the geopolitical stage are worthless. Thousand-word front-page articles that provide no more new information than a ticker bulletin aren't marginally better, but mostly just longer.

The Internet provides the opportunity to break free of the newspaper straitjacket of inverted pyramids and column inches. Google is tinkering with a new thing they call "living stories." These are topic pages for ideas like "The War in Afghanistan" that create timelines for news stories so you can follow developments and fit them into a storyline. That's a good idea. Spencer Ackerman says individual writers should try the same thing by using topic tags and the blog format to create updating pages that follow a story's development. That's another good idea.

One can imagine the emergence of a kind of "story tree" where all the major developments of a big story like health care reform would live on an constantly updating page. Each new development could have two parts: What Was New (in a sentence) and Why It Mattered (in a paragraph). That's it. No quotes because the voice is omniscient. No lede because the intro is already on the page. The Internet's capacity for linking practically begs for stories to talk to each other in a way that is impossible on a single ream of paper. The best way to harness that capacity is to be brief and let your old work do some of the talking.

Finally, here's a good round-up of reactions to Kinsley's piece from Atlantic Wire.