You can put long articles on the internet. But Josh Tyrangiel, Managing Editor of Time.com says it doesn’t really work and he has a sensible explanation of why. If you look at the traffic statistics for any newsish website you’ll see that people are reading when they’re supposed to be at work. Which means they’re multitasking. Which means they want short items.

This reminds me that something I’ve come to understand in my years in the business is that probably the greatest privilege that writers for traditional magazines have is that nobody has any idea who’s reading them. Instead, they get to sort of operate with this mental image of things working very differently from the guy reading blogs instead of filling out his TPS Report. Maybe you’re relaxing in your easy chair, smoking a pipe, lovingly devouring each and every sentence of that 6,000 feature. Nice to think of your writing getting that kind of loving care from readers.

But if you think about how magazines actually work, it’s really not like that. I subscribe to The New Yorker because it’s a great magazine. But do I read every article that’s in every issue of the New Yorker? Of course not. In fact, some weeks I barely read any articles at all. And as best I can tell, the same is true of most New Yorker subscribers. And certainly almost nobody reads more than a trivial percentage of the content The New York Times puts out on any given day. But in print, nobody can really tell what’s being read or when or why or by whom. You just know that the gestalt is selling. Which gives editors and writers a lot of flexibility in terms of what they put into the gestalt. Which is fun because in my experience people get into writing and editing periodicals primarily because they enjoy doing it rather than because they’re genuinely interested in being responsible fiduciary agents of profit-maximizing shareholders.

On the web, there’s much less wiggle room and much less room for self-deception. You need readers who really and truly do click over to your site each and every day, not “subscribers” who may or may not be reading any given issue. And you know the—unflattering—truth about when they read you. Generally at work, and with intermittent attention.

In April, Vice President Cheney received extensive media coverage when he called on the Obama administration to release two CIA memos allegedly showing evidence that the Bush-era interrogation policies saved lives. His request came in response to critics who lambasted the Bush administration’s program and said it actually hurt U.S. efforts. From Cheney’s interview with Sean Hannity on April 20:

HANNITY: And secondly, why is it important that those interrogations took place? I mean, the ones they were talking about were sleep deprivation, waterboarding, putting insects into small, confined areas and telling them they were deadly insects. [...]

CHENEY: It worked. It’s been enormously valuable in terms of saving lives, preventing another mass casualty attack against the United States. … And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.

Yesterday, the CIA released two of those memos from 2004 and 2005, which had been secret until now. As Spencer Ackerman notes, these memos do nothing to back up Cheney’s claims:

Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

This finding is big news. You’d think that since the media reported so much on Cheney’s claims about the documents, they would also rush to report that Cheney was wrong. Not so. Greg Sargent notes that in the major newspapers, this fact was “either not covered at all, buried deep in stories, or described in highly hedged language.”

ThinkProgress went through the coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC and found that television outlets are performing as poorly as their print counterparts. Most of the networks’ reports omitted the Cheney angle. When they did address it, they tended to give Cheney the benefit of the doubt by saying that it was “not clear” from the heavily-redacted documents. The only individuals to note Cheney’s lie were guest commentators. Watch a few of the segments here:

Cheney has since put out a carefully worded statement saying that “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.” However, the fact remains that there is still no public evidence that those techniques actually saved lives.