When I started writing for the Internet back in 1997, the general thinking among what few net journalists there were back then was that shorter was better. Stories were supposed to be at most a few paragraphs long. Everyone seemed to feel this was the way it ought to be, but the reasons stated varied a lot.
The most pragmatic writers, it seemed to me, were those who felt that shorter stories allowed more room for ads or perhaps that shorter stories would lead to more frequent page refreshes allowing more banner ads (the only real type of ads we had back then).
Some editors claimed they read research that concluded shorter was better, with “better” either meaning: 1) more people got to the end of the story (makes sense if the story is shorter); or 2) readers retained more information from the story (makes sense since shorter stories probably contain less information).
I took a different path, not really caring if people read or comprehended. I wrote long pieces. L-o-n-g pieces, some as long as 4400 words, which was more than ten times the supposed target length at places like Cnet. It was the only way I knew, as a recovering magazine feature writer, to get my point across. And since I was writing for a non-commercial site, it didn’t seem to really matter.
Nearly 10 years into this experiment, here is what I have learned: longer is better. Generally speaking, the longer my essays the more popular they were, both in the short and long terms. That 4400 word monster I really should have broken into two parts was not only popular at the time, it continues to be read — six years later — by hundreds of people each week. Longer has more information, has more to say, makes a stronger point, and is ultimately more memorable. There‚Äôs a reason why people like to read books.
Yet still most journalism web sites prefer short stories and they still prefer them for exactly the reasons cited above, despite the fact that it is contradicted by my experience and possibly the experience of others. Alas, this shorter-is-better tendency seems to have extended to the blogosphere. This is not inherently bad. Blogs, after all, don’t appear to really have a formal definition and can be pretty much whatever their authors want them to be. But I would be interested to know whether long or short posts are better received by readers?
And the real reason, I think, why the early news sites wanted short stories was pure laziness. If “covering” a story meant no more than three paragraphs, any re-write man could cover news all day by simply re-stating wire stories and not having to pay anything for the material.
Internet journalism was seen as idiot journalism back then. Nobody really expected it to go anywhere. Today we know Internet journalism is great for breaking news and for stories of interest to niche audiences, but as more and more people get their news solely from the net that will change. And I hope the next generation of writers comes to believe that longer IS better, and their editors finally figure out that longer is at least okay.
Longer is often better for video, too. When I started doing doing hour-long NerdTV shows, I was called crazy by other broadcasters who thought three minutes was too long. Yet now look at how many people are watching TV dramas on-line in their entirety. I don’t have TiVO and I have little kids so the only way I ever get to watch Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, for example, is by going to nbc.com. And for my purposes, why would I do it any other way? The shows are shorter because they contain fewer ads and I’m sitting at my PC anyway, darn it.
That’s the last part of this watching-TV-on-your-PC thing. Whether you talk about lean-forward or lean-back TV, most people would PREFER to watch on a bigger screen in a more comfortable environment so that’s where the market is heading with all these new gizmos to shunt our PC video to the TV in the family room. I’m not at all opposed to that, by the way. Bring it on. But there is a big difference between what people prefer to do and what they are WILLING to do.
Someone who spends 40-60 hours per week sitting at a computer display may well prefer to be entertained at home with a big plasma display, but the fact is that for much of their waking life they are in front of a smaller display and that’s becoming a perfectly viable target for the same content because people are WILLING to view it there.
There’s an insidious effect happening in our work places. The slave drivers have banned radios and there were never TV’s, but we can have both running on our computers virtually full-time. Internet radio is a workplace Godsend and Internet TV is headed in the same direction. This is all good. And it is all lean-forward no matter what the content, because big screens and leaning back haven’t made it to many offices and probably never will.
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