From Ryan Chittum at CJR, Oct. 11, 2011

Story length in journalism by itself doesn’t mean much. We read too many news stories that are just too damned long.

But, on the other hand, without going long, it’s hard to achieve greatness. It sure makes harder to tell a story or lay out evidence, much less capture nuance and complexity. A longer story signals to readers that this story is important and that more work went into it.

This is to say that your average 4,000 word piece is just going to be reported more deeply and edited more heavily than your average 400-word FT news story, say. It’s possible there’s a great business journalism haiku poet out there, I suppose. Let us know if you spot one.

The Wall Street Journal’s page one has long been the standard-bearer for business writing and reporting, at least for newspapers. It took news and turned it into narrative nonfiction, everyday, twice a day, for decades. But Rupert Murdoch made it no secret that he disdained the Journal’s page-one tradition of long-form journalism, and it’s been de-emphasized under his ownership. That’s our qualitative impression, anyway, based on reading the paper, following the tealeaves, and talking to former colleagues.

Number of A1 stories longer than 1,500 words in the last decade. From CJR

Read the full article on CJR