Inch counts -- good or bad?

At some point, it had a Plan 9 From Outer Space quality to it. I had to see how a story that long on something so unworthy was built. When I got home, I grabbed the online version and stuck it in Word to see what it weighed in at.

 

I like some reporter's train of thought -- I'll write 8 inches for print, and then 30 for the web because there's an infinite amount of space on the internet.

Yeah buddy.. because online readers frequently like to read your extraneous garble-turned-into-a-novella online.

 

You ain't kidding. I can already see the gleam in some crap reporter's eyes when he realizes that if he wants to do a 100-graf story on the water board meeting, nothing can stop him. And the small-time COLUMNISTS, hell's bells. Welcome to the Villarealization of sports journalism.

 

Our writers all learned fairly quickly that unlimited space doesn't mean the unlimited mandate to use it.

Our regular columns rarely run over 800-900 words. Internet readers aren't looking for long.

The nice thing, within that context, is that I haven't had to go through and do widow trims, or painstaking editing of quotes or whatever, for years.