{"id":8153,"date":"2020-07-18T08:39:31","date_gmt":"2020-07-18T14:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8153"},"modified":"2020-07-18T08:39:32","modified_gmt":"2020-07-18T14:39:32","slug":"bloomberg-eic-micklethwait-we-publish-too-many-mediocre-and-long-enterprise-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8153","title":{"rendered":"Bloomberg EIC Micklethwait: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/talkingbiznews.com\/they-talk-biz-news\/bloomberg-eic-micklethwait-we-publish-too-many-mediocre-and-long-enterprise-stories\/\">Chris Roush<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The key person to think about is the reader. They are busy people \u2014 who normally read only one screen or a story and SELDOM read more than two screens. (A screen typically is around 300 words, though a lot depends on the illustrations.) That does not mean no long stories. As I have said before, a long story on a complicated topic can save readers time if it replaces the need to read a lot of short ones. We need to do pieces that join the dots. And everybody will always read something long of it is fascinating. Some of our most-read stories are from Businessweek. But is has to be good enterprise. Some of our enterprise stories at the moment should really have been Blasts \u2014 and a few should just have been spiked.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>In general our readers either want to have a quick piece of information or something that justifies the longer read. A good rule of thumb is that stories should either be shorter than 400 words or longer than 900. You either have a simple news story or a single observation (in which case go short) or a yarn or a chance to explain something very complicated (in which case go long). But taking 700 words or 800 words to make a single point will just annoy readers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chris Roush: The key person to think about is the reader. They are busy people \u2014 who normally read only one screen or a story and SELDOM read more than two screens. (A screen typically is around 300 words, though a lot depends on the illustrations.) That does not mean no long stories. As I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8153"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8154,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8153\/revisions\/8154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}