Sunday’s New York Times featured a lengthy Page One article examining Sarah Palin’s style of governing. The Times’ headlines reflect the premise: “Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes. Governor’s Style of Politics is Highly Personal.”

The Post-Dispatch published a reduced version of the Times’ story on Page A11.

A reader emailed us to complain about our editing out much of the Times story.  Our version — 64 inches long — filled two-thirds of one of our news pages, which are slightly wider and longer than the Times’ pages. The Times’ version started on Page One and the continuation filled an entire page inside.

The reader’s email contains a couple descriptions of Palin that would seem to indicate political leanings to the left. But complaints about bias in editing come from both the left and the right.

Here’s part of the reader’s email:

“Today, I am furious that the 3,000+ word front page article in the NYT has been truncated by you to 2,000+ words and placed on page A11. Specifically, more than a dozen quotes, the reportage from the NYT journalists’ efforts to find sources that have interacted with Palin, were cut as were paragraphs that portray Palin’s ruthlessness and zealotry.”

The New York Times itself offered a reduced  version of the article in its emailed TimesDigest available to subscribers. The Sunday story was boiled down to 10 paragraphs. Granted, TimesDigest readers know that a 9-page notebook-size version of the paper has undergone some serious condensing.

The emailer asks that we “indicate below the byline when an article is not printed in its entirety.”

Pretty much, readers should expect that most of what they read in the newspaper and on STLtoday has been reduced from its original length. Even local stories are usually edited down from what our reporters submit, as editors try to eliminate repetition and superfluous detail.

In the case of stories we pull from our wire services — the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, McClatchy newspapers, etc. — stories are usually reduced because of our limited space for news. By editing stories down — sometimes to just a couple paragraphs — we can increase the number of topics that appear.

Editors recognize the need to allow sufficient space for stories that need to run long — like the Palin story in Sunday’s paper. But even that massive amount of space wasn’t enough for one reader.

Did anyone else read both versions? (Links appear above.) Did our editing change the flavor of the Times’ reporting?