A Few Words About...

Fortunately for me, cyberspace columns can run on and on without us having to pay for more ink.

At Recovering Journalist, former Post staffer Mark Potts sides with the brass:

"The snickering already has begun about The Washington Post's new internal edict about story lengths. And I'm sure there's even more snarkiness about the new policy among my old friends and colleagues in The Post's newsroom.

"But you know what? Post Executive Editor Len Downie and Managing Editor Phil Bennett are right: Too many stories in the paper go on much too long. They need to go on a diet. The problem is most acute, interestingly, not in the paper's long investigative or features takeouts, but in day-to-day beat stories. I frequently find myself several inches into a mundane Post story about government goings-on, or a local crime, or a local business development, only to realize that I simply don't care about the rest of the story. I've read enough to know what I need to know, and the remaining inches are just superfluous. Happens all the time . . . and not just at The Post, of course.

"It's probably easy to blame short reader attention spans (including mine) for this. But story lengths seem to have steadily become more bloated over the years."

Slate's Jack Shafer warns against going too far:

"If followed to the letter, much of the memo's advice would produce a newspaper I wouldn't want to buy. I don't read newspapers to save time. If I did, USA Today would be my primary newspaper. I read newspapers to take up time. Unless trapped on an Amtrak car or an airplane, I rarely read from every story. Like other hunter-gatherers, I graze on the fattest fruits and nibble on the tart and tannic pieces. What I enjoy about a newspaper is the breadth of variety and length.

"The Post memo endorses variety in length, too, so I suspect my view isn't that far removed from Messrs. Downie and Bennett's. The proof will be in what sort of newspaper this memo directs into being. I don't envy the editors the task of holding back the word torrents. Reporters overflow the banks more reliably than do rivers."

Washingtonian's Harry Jaffe agrees with part of the indictment:

"To be sure, the Post publishes many long stories that go down like Castor oil and few readers finish. But the paper also will publish powerful, passionate, and entertaining features, like Emily Wax's piece about young breast cancer survivors.

"Feature writers have been expecting this. Style led the way with a directive on shorter stories late last year. Downie just spread the rules across the newsroom and deputized editors to make it stick."

In yesterday's column, I talked about how the Huffington Post had taken down comments from some lefty loonies who wished the bombing attack in Afghanistan had killed Dick Cheney. I also made a point of saying this was clearly a fringe. Believe me, I lived through eight years of some right-wing crazies wishing that Bill Clinton could be disappeared and accusing him, without evidence, of murder, drug-running and the like. Each side has its nutcases, who thankfully are in the minority.