Newspaper articles need to be shorter, argues Michael Kinsley in The Atlantic.

One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet, he says, is that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is “encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news.”

In the case of the majority of news reports — especially those overly wordy ones from the New York Times – Kinsley is right.