[fishtoaster]

This is my pet peeve on long-form writing. I'll get all excited about, eg, a 20-page article on a new discovery about black holes, but then bounce pretty quickly when the first 9 paragraphs are meaningless descriptive details about the reporter's first visit with the scientist who made the discovery. I realize the need to add human interest throughout a long read, but I get annoyed when it turns out it's just a 2-page article's worth of content spread out over 20 pages.

[allenu]

This is very similar to documentary series today on streaming services. There's not a whole lot of story to fill 4-5 episodes, but they need to pad it, so they have meandering narratives and asides that don't really add to the overall story but give the viewer just enough "hooks" to keep going.

In some ways, this is not too dissimilar to articles on the web where articles that could be very short are padded out with extra paragraphs to help with SEO, though in this case the "searcher" is the reader looking for long, meaty articles.