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May 25, 2005

The size of topics

David L Marcus, recounting how a brief article about "therapeutic schools" turned into a book:

As I wrote my nine-paragraph article for U.S. News, I knew I was missing the real story. It was an increasingly familiar feeling. The newspaper and magazine journalism I did seemed superficial, a caricature, a sketch that reflected some editor's idea of an issue. This time the feeling obsessed me. I decided to write a book about teenagers who get themselves into jams... [p. 32, Brown Alumni Monthly, , "Close to Home," March/April 2005, pp. 30-45]

We're seeing discourse assume a more "natural" shape now that the bonds of the physical have been loosened. Encyclopedias have 10x as many articles that tend to be shorter. Topics that cost too much newsprint get spun out at length in electrons. I find this fascinating. [Technorati tag: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

Posted by D. Weinberger at May 25, 2005 05:40 PM

Comments

Would this then be the reasoning the editors at Britannica used to draw down the volume of information on the history of Rome from 35 pages to a scant two or 3 between 1956 and 1993 -- too much to report on, must dumb it down to keep it within a certain total page and volume limit?

(Info on the dumbing down alluded to at Tom Matrullo's:
http://interimtom.blogspot.com/2005/05/world-we-have.html

Posted by: fp | May 25, 2005 06:19 PM

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