“The simple-minded silliness of lipstick-on-a-pig filled at least one cable news cycle, but the question of what kind of executive Sarah Palin has been as mayor and governor didn’t lend itself to the bite-sized format of the nightly news or the constant low-grade babble of cable.”

— Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times

Last weekend, as I was putting together Saturday’s Daily News, I had to make a choice: Do I run the 40-inch analysis on Sarah Palin’s history as a chief executive, or a couple of shorter, fresher but less important stories about the day’s campaign trail antics (and a little something about that lipstick debacle). The longer story was, arguably, much more important. But I also know that the longer a story is, the less likely someone is to read it.

This is the conundrum wrought by a blisteringly quick news cycle, the Webification of everything. Thankfully, I’m not the only one who sees it (although it increasingly feels that way).

Some choice portions of a recent article in the Los Angeles Observer, lamenting the loss of in-depth analysis — or, more accurately, the loss of interest in such. (Full article here.)

“It’s obvious, and no crime against humanity, that the world has many, many places to turn for information, misinformation, analysis, rants, etc,” wrote Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, in an e-mail. “We—The Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the news outlets that aim to be aggressive, serious and impartial—don’t dominate the conversation the way we once did, and that’s fine, except it means some excellent hard work gets a little muffled.

“But we do want our work to be noticed,” he wrote, “and I’ve been repeatedly surprised at the rich, important stories that fail to resonate the way they deserve.”

On one level, more people read The Times, albeit in digital form, than ever. The pipeline piece did a brisk business as an e-mail forward. But so did everything else anyone had to say that day about the campaign—whether it was true or false, reported or simply asserted, fact or opinion. In-boxes crammed with New York Times articles and Huffington Post hyperlinks do not advertise their relative value or importance. Everything is equal, everything is a tie and nothing, it seems, is important anymore. …

“One of the casualties, I think, is that powerfully reported and written stories, especially investigative and accountability ones, do not land with the impact they once did,” (Politico editor Jim VandeHei) said. “They might still turns heads—and thankfully at times change things—but usually they get pushed aside as the new-media machine moves to the next ‘thing.’” …

“There’s so much content to fill,” said (Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi). “People who write for news magazines like Newsweek and Time, in the old days, they’d be writing one feature a week. Now they have to file every single day for Web sites, and do video hits, appear on TV shows, and that’s in addition to writing their features. The same people are doing four and five times as much work and, obviously, they’re not going to have a great deal of depth on any subject.”