Don Fry Someone once asked Robert Frost why he never wrote free verse.
Limits make the game.
The art of news writing involves fitting information into space determined by someone else. The sloppy method means writing long and having other people whack it back without reading, the only virtue of the antiquated inverted pyramid, which takes control of the information away from the person who knows it best. Any newspaper chopping stories from the bottom without reading in the computer age is grossly disorganized. Such information design requires the writer to know the space available. Reporters who have a length in mind when they type will turn in stories approximately that length, or a little longer, maybe five to ten percent more.