I hope it’s clear here that I’m actually talking about the print edition, not a newspaper.com. The hard copy of a newspaper is a lot easier to navigate than a Web site — all you have to do is move your eyeballs. By focusing on “layering” stories into hed, subheds, breakouts, graphics, modern print design gives a reader permission to move his eyeballs off the story at a bunch of different parts of the process. This is great; readers should be able to drill down to their desired level of detail, then stop.

My point here is that with broadcast, there’s no choice involved. Either you tune in for the show, or you don’t. So broadcasters keep their pieces short, lest they alienate their audience.

A complicated, thorough report can actually detract from a news broadcast. In print, where people can customize their reading of a news story, thoroughness is a much smaller problem. (Good broadcast news, of course, is poetically short and thoughtful. There just aren’t enough poets.)

All this is my way of explaining why newspapers have more reporters than TV stations. If we understand this, I hope we can build business models that lend themselves to newspaper-level staffing, not TV-station staffing, at the newspaper Web sites of the future.

Does that make sense?