The necessary fantasy for reporters is that people read their stuff. To the end.
But we know that is not so. We know how we read ourselves. We know that the reader, in print or online, is like a guy in a recliner with a beer in one hand and a remote in the other. Headline, two or three paragraphs, CLICK.
But the Internet holds out the seductive promise that there are no limits. Writers, no longer confined by the constraints of the printed page, are free to treat their subjects at length, and they do.
Then, when the article that went online earlier in the day falls into my hands to be fitted to a printed page, I discover thirty, forty, sixty lines of overset. Shortly thereafter, the article falls neatly into its appointed space.
Oh, if it is, say, a concert review that runs six or eight lines long, I will reach for the scalpel, excising a prepositional phrase here or substituting a short word for a longer one there to gain a line. But for the bigger tasks, the vorpal blade goes snicker-snack, usually to no great harm. I seldom experience any regret over what must be cut.
That freedom to write at length includes the freedom to write slack sentences and indulge in repetition. Long swaths of background information, once laboriously keyboarded in, can be copied and pasted in a few keystrokes. It's too easy.
An early mentor, Bob Johnson, the news editor at The Cincinnati Enquirer, was known among reporters as the "Texas chainsaw editor," and I learned from him to do what was necessary without regret. (I also recall his bursting out one night as he waited for delivery of a front-page story: "Damn city desk, if they'd written the Bible, you wouldn't be able to fit it in a boxcar, and it wouldn't be done yet.")
My guess is that, unless you have a riveting account (and really, how often does that ever happen?), your online reader is going to experience fatigue and drift away after one, perhaps two screens of text.
You could write shorter. You should write shorter.
And if you don't, I'll be on the desk again tonight.