How long should online articles be?

Zainab Zakari has penned This article is 1,689 words long for the New York Review of Magazines, reporting on the various theories concerning how long articles should be online. Mentions various studies on attention spans and anecdotal evidence of why 1,000 words is an arbitrary and incorrect benchmark.

"Weisberg chose 1,000 words arbitrarily, but he and Nielsen are echoing the prevailing wisdom that, on the web, shorter is always better. If you don’t keep it short, you’ll lose the reader’s attention—and once a reader is bored, all it takes is one mouse click to kill an article.

Are these assumptions justified? Based on my personal experience, an informal survey of the literature in the field and conversations with various social psychologists and social scientists, I believe they are not."

NYTimes on journalistic ethics

The New York Times Company Policy on Ethics in Journalism... for those dying to read it.

RIAA vs. The People

I'm sure at some point this report from the EFF on the four-year legal war between downloaders and the RIAA will be useful.

The firing of Bill Brioux

D.B. Scott, a well-known magazine consultant, has a great blog where one can learn lots about the business of magazines (journalistic ones and otherwise). Today he's posted a link (with a bit of commentary) to Dennis Earl's blog and conversation with Bill Brioux.

Brioux used to work at the Toronto Sun as a TV columnist, but was recently fired. His e-mail to Earl is good insight into the current state of affairs at the Sun, as well as a qualified opinion about media ownership in general.

You can see Scott's posting and an excerpt from Brioux's thoughts here, and Dennis Earl's original posting here

Spin Cycles by Ira Basen

A CBC column fired my way by Ontarion Aaron about spin. It looks to be the first in a series. Not very Canada-centric, but that makes sense in terms of measuring the "volume" of spin the U.S. puts out in comparison to Canada.

Two-fifty for a headline, and a buck-and-a-half for a deck

OTTAWA -- Reader beware: the headline on your favourite Internet news site may have been bought and prescribed by a political party, candidate, lobbyist, corporation or TV show.

In fact, just about anyone with deep enough pockets can pay some private Internet web proprietors to highlight legitimate news stories of their choice -- along with deeply provocative, or flattering, headlines.

-from The Globe and Mail, January 15, 2007

I originally found this story in today's Metro (TorStar), so I expect it can be found across most of the major dailies. The story doesn't really point fingers at anyone in particular except www.bourque.com, a site I've never visited. Apparently, the site's owner is quite open about the practice of selling headlines. Must investigate.