TLDR: so just how short should your online article be?

TLDR, as it appears on Twitter and other social networks, is sometimes followed by a brief and handy summary of an extended article to be found elsewhere. More often than not, however, TLDR is used as a snippy riposte to a piece deemed too lengthy for digital. TLDR? Too long, didn’t read.

In a world of 140 character tweets and five to six inch mobile phone screens, long is bad. Right? Well, maybe.

It’s certainly true that some publishers are thinking hard about word count. Take Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief of business news site Quartz. He talked recently about the tyranny of the 800-word article. As a former Wall Street Journal journalist he’s written his fair share of stories at this length and he remains unconvinced.

He told Digiday: “A lot of the 800-word stories have been padded out with B matter. It’s called B matter because it’s B grade, not A matter, which is the focal point of the story.”

Delaney argues that readers tend to gravitate to “shorter stuff” online. “It doesn’t mean it’s unsubstantial. It just means it’s really clear about what’s interesting and focuses on that.”

This thinking is reflected in a decision Associated Press took last year. Its journalists were told to make their stories – with a few exceptions – between 300 and 500 words long. Why? “We need to be more disciplined about what needs to be said,” Kathleen Carroll, AP’s executive editor told the Washington Post. “We don’t do enough distilling and honing, and we end up making our readers do more work.”

Play those comments from Quartz and AP back again and it becomes clear that this isn’t really about length – it’s about execution. Long is not necessarily bad. Rambling is bad. A lack of structure is bad. Scant regard of the reader’s needs is bad. And an inability to distinguish between A and B matter is bad.

It’s why the inverted pyramid remains a useful model on which to craft story telling. Created for print to allow subeditors to cut copy from the bottom of an article with impunity, the inverted pyramid imposes a discipline on the writer. It dictates that the most newsworthy information leads, followed by the important details and finally the general information and background (what Delaney calls B matter).

The inverted pyramid wasn’t designed for digital but it works for digital just the same because in place of the finite space of the print publication has come the finite time of the digital reader. And, to borrow from Kathleen Carroll, it forces the writer to distill and hone.

There are other devices available to the writer to help the digital reader. Bullet points, subheads and short (often single sentence) paragraphs can all aid the mobile reader to better navigate the article, long or short.

Meanwhile, some sites have come up with ingenious ways to encourage online readers to overcome their online attention deficit disorder. Some provide word counts while others estimate reading time. One site even provides TLDR-style summaries for those without the time or the stomach for a long(ish) read.

And then there’s the list story, much maligned but when used properly forms an implicit contract between writer and reader about the length of time they will spend in each other’s company. In his defence of the listicle, David Leonhardt accepts that “there certainly have been a lot of silly lists published on the internet”. But he doesn’t believe that the list is “inherently silly”: it can be as nuanced as any other article. And in mounting his defence, he unexpectedly calls on the novelist Umberto Eco as his star witness. In a 2009 Spiegel Online interview, Eco said this:

“The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists ... What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often.”

Delaney says that a good online article needs to be “focused, creative and social with a really good headline” – and it’s difficult to disagree. But it’s also possible to argue that what the Twitter generation and the #longread generation want are one and the same. It’s about execution.

So how long should your online article be? It’s one of the most common questions I get asked when I run writing workshops. And to answer it I’ve introduced a new prop. It’s a piece of string. And, no, I’m not entirely sure how long it is.

Jon Bernstein is an independent digital media consultant and writer, formerly deputy editor, then digital director of New Statesman and multimedia editor at Channel 4 News. He tweets @jon_bernstein

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