Not ALL of the news, just all that fits

"if it was edited out of the report that aired, then doesn't that mean it's probably not necessary?"

I never cease to be amazed by how many professional journalists make fundamental mistakes like Tom Shales's rhetorical question above deriding the additional content news producers include in their online components.

No, Mr. Shales, that does not mean that it's "probably" not necessary. It means that an editor made an editorial/commercial decision that whatever was left out was not important enough for the amount of space available, not specifically that it wasn't necessary.

An argument could be made that nothing other than the headline and maybe a short summary paragraph is actually "necessary" for most articles, thus all those syndicated wire service summaries on out-of-market stories you see in almost every section of every newspaper around. But I would imagine that just about every decent reporter around in theory has already eliminated all of the truly un-necessary elements out of their story before they submit it to their editor, especially at larger newspapers like the Washinton Post/NY Times, etc. That is after all their jobs, not just to fill space, except on slow news days, right?

Instead what shows up in print, on the air, online, etc., is a version of the story generally edited for criteria other than necessity, generally to fit the news hole available after sucking out all of the ads/commercials necessary to pay for the distribution and overhead of a publishing enterprise. Even non-commercial entities still have a finite amount of space available to fill due to the physical limitations of their medium.

In print the limitation is the cost of printing: how much does it cost for whatever the next larger available multiple of pages to be produced? If you have a magazine where a printed sheet is cut into 16 individual pages, then you are dealing in increments of 16, so every addition has that consideration. In a newspaper, it's as little as the front and back of a single page, so you don't add just a paragraph, you add a minimum of 2 pages, but that single page often seems to slip out of the paper, so it's much more common to see a full 4 pages added rather than the minimum.

In broadcast, there is no such flexibility, since an hour is an hour any which way you slice it. If you extend a story, it's almost always at the expense of another story, rarely if ever at the expense of even an extra 15 second spot due to the relative cost of air-time.

However, online your limits are generally what the editorial staff has placed on themselves, and of course the attention span of the viewer. Even with ad rates as cheap as they are today, an editor would be silly to cut something that even an extremely narrow segment of the audience would be willing to read/watch, since it truly is lost revenue.

For an example, take a hypothetical current event story about a G-8 summit in Moscow. In print and on the air that story will have to fight with everything else that is going on that day to justify its space in the news hole. Online the only competition is for the precious real estate on whichever section/home page the site uses to link to the story. Once a user clicks on the story, why would you limit the amount of information that you display to that user to what could be justified in the above equation for a newspaper article?

Even more, online you could take an extra 5 minutes and add in links to pre-existing background materials, generating more clicks/page-views and ad impressions. And if you really want to earn your money, you could take a little extra time and maybe have the reporter add a sidebar listing the strange trivia items that generally accompany any such meeting of high-powered/high-ego personalities: what they ate, who sat next to whom, why the French President insists on kissing instead of shaking the hand of a fellow President just because it is a woman, etc. Maybe even add in a little local color, like the recent Economist article detailing the typical experience going through Russian airports ( link for paid online/print subscribers), because how many of your readers are likely to get to go to Moscow?

So long as the additional material generates enough additional ad impressions to pay for the minuscule additional labor necessary, you're on the positive side of the profitability equation, and since that's what pays the bills for the companies that pay reporters to report, that looks like a pretty positive thing to me. As a journalist, I'm interested in informing my audience as fully as I and the limitations of my medium are capable of, and whether that's done in print, on the boob tube, or online, I don't care.