Blame the Internet

I've been writing articles for various magazines for a while, and one trend that I've noticed is that the length of articles that editors ask for has dropped dramatically in the past few years. About five years ago, it seems that the most commonly requested length for magazine articles was between 2,000 and 2,500 words. More recently, this average has dropped to a much shorter length. Now it's more like 750 to 1,000 words.

It's no coincidence that that's roughly how much will fit on a single magazine page. Editors that I've talked to recently tell me that the typical reader doesn't read past the first page of an article, so it may be the case that editors are shortening the articles in their publications to deal with that reality.