There is a great piece in The Atlantic by Michael Kinsey on the sheer verbosity of a lot of newspaper writing. It's hard not to agree with the examples he gives, and with his criticisms of the inverted pyramid style. If this verbosity problem is currently true of newspaper writers, it's even more true of bloggers. I try and practice minimalism in how I blog, but I do so in spite of it being very much out of vogue and not exactly the way to win admirers (in the form of hits, links etc.) 
Blog posts, unlike newspaper articles, can scale down as small as a word or two. If you want to learn how to blog, I suggest you read Metafilter, Rebecca Blood's book The Weblog Handbook (review) and the early archives of Scripting News. As I've said many times before, I remember when I was trying to advocate this super-condensed form of blogging a few years ago - you don't need a title, you don't need a picture, you just need to say what the story is in the fewest words possible and pack it full of hyperlinks to the original sources - people thought I was completely bonkers and "on the wrong side of history" (standard tech-geek response - history only goes in one direction, right?). Said people are now addicted to Twitter, Facebook status updates, FriendFeed, identi.ca et al. And no bad thing either. One of the primary criticism of Twitter seems to that you can't say anything meaningful in under 140 characters. Of course you can. You just need to be disciplined about it. The same is true for blogging.
If you want to learn how not to blog, look at the big "industrial"-produced blogs - Gizmodo, Engadget, TUAW, TechCrunch, and even BoingBoing. Also Google "problogger", "problogging" and "problog" and read. All that stuff is just cancerous noise. Either use it as inspiration for how not to blog or just cut it out of your life altogether. Note how every article (not post - they are mere pretenders) has a title, a few paragraphs, a picture (or embedded video or whatever) and a whole lot of extra clutter. Cut away all that noise. YAGNI. Journalists and bloggers: learn from Twitter. You won't be able to summarise everything in 140 characters. You won't be able to get everything into one sentence or one line, but just try. That's not a commandment: you can and should sometimes expend a few paragraphs on a long and detailed piece. Everyday brevity need not apply to complex and multi-layered arguments. But for ordinary, run-of-the-mill daily news, you can stop spouting the obvious things, just give people the diffs, and cut out all those pictures. Really. YAGNI.
Another thing: You know when you are watching the television news and they have a report on, say, education reform. They always show you a picture of a school. Political interviews always have a backdrop of the Houses of Parliament (or the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.) - it's called B-Roll and it is quite obviously clutter. Redundant, trite, cliche - please, you don't need to do it on television and you don't need to do it online. You read a tech story on one of the industrial-blogging sites and they always have a picture. Rarely, if ever, does it actually illustrate the story. It serves only one purpose: fluffing the entry up to make it seem significant. You don't need it. Cut it out. If you want to add more depth to a piece, link. You can keep the clutter, but my making it so that it sits hidden behind a whole load of hyperlinks, you have made it optional.
