A recent online (members only) discussion of how to save newspapers in our digital age considered perils and advantages of digitilization. Left out, and maybe irrelevant considering the Decline of Taste and Reason in our time, was an editorial rather than technical solution to the decline of newspaperdom, namely to write tighter.
Newspapers such as Chi Trib, what I’m most familiar with, lets people go on and on, leaving unedited and uncut the writer who knows what people ought to know and will tell them regardless of people’s willingness to be told, or at least told so much. The writer knows what’s best for people and supplies it. He must have space or his professional dignity is compromised.
This is not counting those who very carefully use much ink saying something that requires it, which is of course where editorial judgment comes in, i.e. taste.
Meanwhile, however, readers have turned the page and it’s readers one, newspaper nothing.
Blithe Spirit 