I Ought to Be an Editor-in Chief

Dear Atlantic Monthly,

You recently ran an article called "This Article in Too Long." It focused on how newspaper articles are full of gratuitous description and "fluffy" details that have no place in hard-boiled news. With complete lack of irony, it argued that the average sentence in a newspaper article could be cut down by at least a third while losing no meaning whatsoever.

I have one question for you: have you read your own articles?

They are quite possibly the longest articles in the world's history of publishing. And while I tend to find the first ten pages of each pretty interesting, after that my attention starts to lag.

I'm not saying you need to go all "thirty second attention span" on us. I love your investigative journalism. But perhaps you're not on the highest of moral high-grounds to be complaining about lack of judicious editing.

An expression about pots and kettles comes to mind, but in the interests of keeping this letter short, I'll simply allude to it.

Sincerely,
A reader

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Dear Most Magazines in the Checkout Lane at the Grocery Store,

When I've made the crucial error of taking two small children grocery shopping on a weekend afternoon and have to stand in a checkout lane for eight frillion hours, trying to keep them from man-handling the candy I will not buy, the least you could do is throw me a bone and write cover teasers that bear some relation whatsoever to the article titles in your table of contents. There is nothing more maddening than being sucked in by the promise of a juicy story about "Taming Preschool Tantrums for Good" only to find that no listed stories would appear to be about that topic.

And while we're at it? The teasers that are linked to tiny, one-paragraph filler items buried on a page full of pictures of lipstick? Those ought to be a criminal offense. If the topic is interesting enough to warrant hot-pink capital letters on the precious real estate of the cover, chances are readers want more than three sentences about it.

I suggest you contact the writers of Atlantic Monthly for suggestions on how to milk a few more details for a story.

Sincerely,
Every Harried Mother in Kroger

P.S. If you do contact the Atlantic, do NOT ask them about cover mini-headlines. They are egregious offenders in this regard.

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Dear the Few Magazines that actually put tiny page numbers on the cover under the teaser headlines, or include a screen shot of the cover with page numbers added for reference on the table of contents page,

Thank you.

I can turn to you in a pinch to try to save my sanity, and I admire the example you set for the rest of those publishing bozos.

If only you were magazines I liked to read, the world would be perfect.

Sincerely,
Desperate in Checkout Lane 14