How long is too long?

It's interesting how this works, too.

I do not and will not deal with word counts. If a stringer says, do you want 450 words, I tell them I need 15 inches. Then I ask one of the writers what the word/inch conversion is.

 

One trick I learned was to get in there early. Write the story as quickly as possible and sometimes, the tradeoff would be a few extra inches.

 

It's amazing how other writers can be doing it for 20, 25 years, and they never figure that out.

 

When I started, none of our computers had word count software, but did do inch counts. Didn't help when I was on the road on a laptop. So I learned to approximate one paragraph per inch. Not exact, but usually pretty close.

 

The size of our news pages has changed so many times and the measurements for our word processing program have not been updated accordingly. Further, 15 inches on the new tiny type USA Today is using vs. what our paper uses would produce very different counts. Back in the day, here, 15 inches used to be 500 words. Now, 15 inches may not even be 400 words. I'm an editor (and columnist/beat writer/do it all) and I go with word count. It's a certainly in a variable world.