Traditional news presents information with more vertical space in the first place. The balance is between effort exerted to scroll text that is horizontally compressed vs effort moving your eye across the screen.<p>If you were to put your content on the screen in such a way that you were not padding with whitespace, but instead were doing a multi-column layout <i>like</i> a newspaper, that would be the best of all worlds I imagine, but it would look extremely disjointed to viewers and you would have to lock the vertical scrolling. But websites are not optimizing space for readability with columns - they are just padding the text body, creating more hand work in exchange for less eye work without considering their efforts are making people exert more total work when they have to scroll more, whereas traditional media is not just padding whitespace, it is introducing vertical columns of text adjacent one another.