New MarketWatch editor: “Bring me bagels!” And it’s good writing advice

In an interview with Talking Biz News, Jeremy Olshan, the new editor in chief of MarketWatch.com, makes a few points I found interesting.

As the headline points out, Olshan wants most MarketWatch stories to stick to 400 words, “without all the empty calories and filler journalists love to stuff in the sausage. We will also do longer, deep dives on important stories that warrant such treatment. This is the way the digital news is going: tall and venti, no more grande.”

That’s not a new idea, but we just heard last week that the traditional newspaper length, around 750 words, was optimal from the perspective of users’ attention, which advertisers crave. I wonder if Olshan will run into some resistance to his 400-words edict from the business side.

Olshan also makes a point that’s a favorite around here, about having to stand out from the crowd: “It’s important to routinely ask the Passover question: Why is this site different from all other sites?”

And most amusingly, when asked what he looks for when hiring someone to work at MarketWatch, Olshan says, “Someone to fetch me bagels.” That sounds like a joke, a little self-deprecating humor about what a lousy boss he is. But it turns out to be a tasty bit of writing advice:

My years at the New York Post taught me how to tell stories with a sledgehammer, how to find that one detail that ends up a kind of shorthand for anyone talking about the whole affair. When New York City Councilman Larry Seabrook was busted in 2010 on the usual corruption charges, for instance, we focused on one of the seemingly minor offenses: He fudged his expenses to charge taxpayers $177 for a single bagel. Whenever Seabrook is mentioned now the sentence almost always contains the word bagel.

I am looking for reporters who can find the bagel in every story. Tweets are now the atomic unit of journalism. When quizzing reporters on their stories, editors used to say, “So what’s the headline here?” Now we ask, “what’s the tweet?”