How Long Should a Story Be?
Tom Scocca · 02/26/16 05:45PMSome articles should be short. Some articles should be long. No articles, as Vox and its SB Nation demonstrated, should be longform. Greg Howard’s postmortem of SB Nation’s “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?” debacle offers lots of insights into how a story can go wrong, but the most concise may be his reporting that a freelancer for SB Nation’s now-closed Longform section “said that per the terms of his contract, the story had to be at least 4,000 words long.”