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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/12989
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There are two reasons. First, as described in [this answer](https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/12988/1993), news articles are written as an inverted pyramid and are designed to be cut at any paragraph break and still work. In the late stages of newspaper assembly, the editor making the decisions about what goes where and making it all fit is not going to read and decide -- he's going to lop it off at a paragraph break. So you need paragraph breaks at "steps" in content-importance, and the more a writer does this the easier the editor's job is.

Second, journalism style developed in the context of print newspapers. A typical newspaper has 4-6 columns of text on a page, each column being fairly narrow. You want to avoid the "wall of text" where a story goes for several inches without paragraph breaks, because readers facing that tend to bail. This tends to push for shorter paragraphs (by word- or sentence-count), so that the final newspaper presentation will still be usable. While the constraints are different for online news read on desktop computers, two points: (a) some people read on phones (as noted in [this answer](https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/12987/1993)), and (b) the same story has to work for print and online because the editor doesn't want to double his work. So if the online media site has a corresponding print edition, it's going to tend to follow this constraint.

This answer is based on what I learned working on, and ultimately being editor-in-chief of, a student newspaper in college (where I did late-stage editing with an X-acto knife -- "cut" was literal). I do not have professional journalism experience.

Original score: 5