Politico becomes the latest newsroom to cut down on flabby stories

The Washington Post did it. The Wall Street Journal did it. Now Politico has become the third newsroom in recent months to remind reporters to avoid unnecessarily long stories.

“Some daily stories have been running longer than they need to be, so we’re asking everyone to pay closer attention to story lengths to respect our readers,” read a memo from Politico Executive Editor Paul Volpe. “Most daily stories should not run longer than 1,000-1,100 words.”

Enterprise stories can run longer, but in general “we should aim for under 1,500 words,” Volpe wrote. “When you pitch a story to your editor, you will now need to provide a target story length and we will flag those that seem long. We want to focus on making our stories tighter, sharper and even more readable.”

Both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post in recent months have put out newsroomwide guidance to editors and reporters advising them to trim the fat from their work. At The Washington Post, Managing Editor Cameron Barr told reporters and editors to aim for no more than 1,500 words without good reason. Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker did not provide a word count in his Oct. 11 memo but admonished reporters not to include “a single otiose word” in their stories.

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Volpe’s note includes guidance that other newsrooms would do well to follow, including suggesting multiple headlines, providing editors with language for social media and thinking about multiple story formats. He ends the note with a winking nod at the memo’s clickable subject line (“Five changes to the way we file stories”).

“There isn’t really a fifth, but I was told people are more likely to read if a headline has an odd number,” Volpe wrote.

Here’s his memo: