Call it a pet peeve, but whenever I hear anyone, especially in the mainstream media, complain that audience attention spans are getting shorter, I want to knock that person upside the head.

Putting aside for a moment that I have never heard anyone support such a complaint with hard data, I still have to ask myself what they're peeved about.

Michael Scherer of Time Magazine portends the demise of political journalism and blames it at least in part on an Internet culture that focuses on the "news nugget, the blurb, the linkable atom of information," which is not packaged "but rather sent out into the ether, seeking out links, search engine ranking and as many hits as possible." Scherer cites as example Politico reporter Mike Allen's practice of repurposing a single interview for multiple posts, none of which give you a comprehensive story.

The problem apparently is that people are abandoning longer, more thoughtful reportage in favor of shorter articles and blog posts, and that these sound bites, these tiny tidbits sans context, threaten the very integrity of journalism because they leave readers fending for themselves to discover the truth.

Daniel Tunkelang, a blogger and head of research at an information access firm, agrees and even gives this type of unprocessed news morsel a name, which he says he borrowed from academic publishing. It's called the Least Publishable Unit.

In an exchange with a commenter, Tunkelang clarifies that he is not against divvying a story into smaller units; that's nothing new. What's new (and I can only assume disturbing to him) is "that the motive for this strategy might not be just accommodating people's short attention spans, but also maximizing ad coverage per unit of substance."

First, I have a hard time believing that the economic motivation to slice and dice is new at all. I know a freelance entertainment reporter and journalism teacher who encourages the practice of hacking up interviews because as a freelancer you have to do whatever you can to maximize returns. Often when he scores an exclusive interview, he has told me, he will parse it out into various themes, write different articles for different publications, and thereby get paid for using all of his material rather than just a few salient bits. Angelina Jolie talking about her latest film would be gold for an entertainment magazine, but Jolie talking about her adopted child might be more attractive to a parenting mag.

Second, and more importantly, short news stories are not by definition bad, and the very conclusion that attention spans are shriveling up is both wrongheaded and insulting. The worst part of such banal thinking is that it assumes the audience is stupid. News consumers aren't stupid. They're busy.

I would ask anyone complaining about short attention spans to answer this: When was the last time you read a newspaper front to back? I imagine you haven't done so lately.

There are journalists both inside and outside academia who say the best way to get a lot of news fast is to read the top three or four paragraphs of a story and move on. But when a story intrigues you or seems important, you don't stop at the fourth paragraph or even at the end of the article. Instead, you continue the search for information elsewhere; nowadays you go online, you satisfy your curiosity by exhausting the links in the story. This very article is really just a jumping-off point for those who want to delve deeper into the debate over the future of new media.

Attention spans haven't shrunk. People read what they want to read. If it's engaging, they'll read on. If not, they'll turn it off. Why? Because they're buried under an avalanche of information, both treasure and trash. Readers are smartly opting to share the increased burden with journalists, and it's asinine for reporters to expect any different.

If anything, news consumers are getting savvier. They're Hollywood moguls who, every time someone wants a moment of their time, preface the conversation by saying, "Give me a pitch in 30 seconds or less, or get the hell out of my office." A hardened newspaper editor would give her reporter the same treatment. Well, guess what? The press has just been democratized, and now the audience is your editor.

Look, the public may be changing the way it consumes news, but it's still willing to digest it in all its forms. Blogger Josh Young has created a friendly model for dividing content by type, and really it's not limited to explaining the Web. It's a matrix that crosses the scope of the topic with the depth of the medium. A story can tackle a broad subject but dig only skin deep, for instance, or it can take a nose dive and leave you with more than you wanted to know about a sliver of a topic. Form follows function, as they say.

But all this change amounts to more than a mere seismic shift, nor is it constrained to the journalism industry. If you read enough about what's happening, you'll understand this is the second coming of Gutenberg. By all means, continue reading beyond this article. Daniel Conover offers an excellent take on the future of news here, Jay Rosen offers his "flying seminar" on the same, and for a historical context check out Clay Shirky's overnight sensation, which is long by the way.

Really, it's not the complaint itself that bothers me. It's everything packed into it--the noxious arrogance of gatekeeper journalists who believe anachronistically they ought to control how information reaches our tender impressionable minds, the misguided notion that short equals bad and long equals good, and the angst-ridden attempt to deflect attention away from the real issue, which is that some professionals are having a hard time surviving this revolution.

It's understandable. Everyone is scrambling to determine the best use of all the new media, much as early publishers did with the first iterations of the printing press. But give it time, think forward, and soon enough we will learn to master these new platforms (for a funny take on that, go here).

To Scherer's credit, he closes his piece with a plea to his audience to keep clicking on his stories, and he writes that he will do whatever needs doing, including Tweet, to keep them coming back. Scherer sort of gets it. It's not about the sanctity of the reporter. We're not here to worship the Wordsworthian Journalist. We have become voracious consumers of information, and we want it in every form imaginable, as long as it's good. If it's not, we'll vote you down.

Earlier I mentioned that the press has been democratized. I chose those words carefully. Tocqueville wrote about the American form of democracy with a mixture of alarm and resignation way back in 1835. He was dubious about the ability of the people to lead themselves without help from an elite ruling class (we're not out of the woods yet), yet he was impressed by the average American's ability to speak on a wide range of issues. He also recognized inexorability when he saw it. Here was one of the last French aristocrats mourning the breakdown of the old power structures but ready to embrace the new.

Legacy journalists are facing the same choice Tocqueville faced. They can choose to embrace the new power structure, or they can fade into irrelevance.

So, please, don't blame the collapse of a medium on the attention span of your audience. Or by all means, do. You'll quickly find that no one's listening to you anymore, and that means less competition for me.