This style of journalism predated “online” by decades or longer. Even then people skimmed print newspapers. It’s why they were in columns and grafs were short

This style of journalism predated “online” by decades or longer. Even then people skimmed print newspapers. It’s why they were in columns and grafs were short (often one sentence). All of that was designed to make articles easy to skim. And yes, distraction/boredom was part of it but so was a lack of time for most readers. A lot of news was read over a short breakfast before going to work. A lot of conventions were designed to make it easy to get a quick and broad overview of what the editor thought was important: pyramid style, short blips before “continued on page 11”, putting important things above the fold, etc. It’s interesting which of those aspects translate well to online journalism and which don’t.