“Charts are our version of cat videos” says Kevin Delaney, co-founder of the Quartz news website, in an interview with Richard Edelman, president and CEO of the Edelman PR Agency.
Keep stories short and snappy or long and in-depth with Delany seeing 500 to 800 words as being a ‘dead zone’ for online stories. Interestingly, Edelman’s piece comes in at 760 words.
In future, I’ll be keeping blog posts either very short or extremely long on this site.
What on earth? It seems entirely arbitrary to regard some lengths as desirable, and others not. Surely the best length for a story is however long it takes to say what needs to be said (considering the level of detail the writer wishes to go into), and neither more nor less – especially so on a web site, where a story can be as short or as long as desired, and there are not layout problems as with a magazine or newspaper, where you have to fit things into physical pages and make them fit together.
If there really are reasons for this that I am missing, this blog post might have been more informative if it had explained them.
You appear to take this seriously, if you plan to make your own posts conform to this. So what is the reasoning behind it?
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