What is an editorial?

Every time I sit down to write a post on Papermail, I think about its length. After all, I'm notorious for writing thousands of words about new apps. What exactly is my requirement when I write an editorial? Should it be at least 800 words; should the paragraph count be enough to take up your whole screen; should I go on about things when I don't necessarily have to?

I think about all this as I'm writing, even right now. It's just a natural process, for some reason. But I really don't know what an editorial is. I'm not sure that I could define it if you asked me to. I just sit down and write my thoughts on the subject; sometimes more of them scurry along as I compose. I do constantly want to make things more verbose than they need to be, though. I suppose everyone has their quirks in their writing style, and that's one of mine.

To answer the question, an editorial is defined by the writer. It wouldn't be proper to put a label on every editorial that was ever written because each author has a different state of mind when putting his thoughts on paper. I have always wondered, though: do writers think about length? Does an editorial need to be more than three paragraphs in order to be considered educational by a reader? It's the opposite of "too long; didn't read".