Why The New York Times TL;DR'd its own 14218-word Trump investigation
2 months agoYou could certainly read The New York Times' massive investigation into how Trump's "Self-made" fortune is not only not self-made but also involves tax fraud. So on Tuesday afternoon, at the same time that it published the investigation that was a year in the making, it also aggregated itself - publishing "11 takeaways from the Times's investigation into Trump's wealth." The TL;DR version is by the same authors as the full investigation, and, at over 2,500 words, it's pretty much a longread of its own. "This is one of the longest stories that we've ever run in the news pages of the Times, one of the longest investigative stories we've run period," said Paul Fishleder, who edited the story and who leads the Times' political investigations unit. "It's a big, long, complicated story with many parts, and obviously we hope everyone reads it to the end, but we also know everyone's not going to read it to the end. It seemed appropriate to do a still not short, but way more digestible, on-the-run version of the story." The Times has other plans to promote the story as well. The full story will run in Wednesday's print paper. As for the decision to publish on Tuesday afternoon, Fishleder said, "Needless to say, with a story this long, you don't want to run it in the face of the fiercest news cycle, if that's possible these days. We decided to do it at a time when we felt there was space for it to get maximum attention." Read more