So, Sam Zell plans to trim 500 pages of content each week across his group of Tribune newspapers.

Zell, Trib’s chairman and CEO, and Randy Michaels, the company’s COO, have concluded that less is better, and not just because it is cheaper.

Well, they’re right on two counts.

The first is that newspapers produce far more content than readers have time to read. Why do we insist on delivering two to four hours of reading material to an audience with a window of 20 minutes?