Ever wonder why your Sunday paper is so much thicker than any weekday edition? Could it be there is more news to report on the weekends? Hardly. It shouldn’t surprise you that the advertising department determines how large tomorrow’s edition will be. The newsroom is then invited to fill in whatever space is left. On average, the ratio runs about 60 percent advertising to 40 percent editorial, although I think that’s a conservative estimate.

The good news in that equation is that the limited availability of space forces reporters to deliver the news using the least number of words possible. Same can be said for television news, where the networks are forced to cram a world full of headlines into just 22 minutes.

With the introduction of the Web, however, that discipline has been tossed out the window. Writers now feel free to write as much as they want, to take their time in telling their stories. Someone shared with me the other day a press release that actually ran on for nine pages!

The problem is that our audiences have not changed their level of expectation. They don’t want to slog through your flaccid, overwritten prose in order to understand what it is you are trying to say. So they hit the delete button or the on/off switch. They stop listening and end the dialogue. Your message falls on deaf ears.

Thanks to the wireless world in which we live, ours has become a linear society. If we want to know more, we simply click through to the next, more detailed level of information. And we keep clicking until our appetite for information is satisfied.

When I was editor of a national higher education magazine, I practiced what I like to call my 20-second rule. Because I had to read and often report on as many as two and three dozen press releases a day, if I couldn’t understand the story in a release in 20 seconds, I simply deleted it and moved to the next one.  

So the lesson learned is not to data-dump on your audience. Tell your story, in as direct a manner as possible, and tell it quickly. Leave them wanting to know more.

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