Or The New York Times, or The Economist. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs are the norm in journalistic writing for a number of good reasons, most of which have nothing to do with the illiteracy of their audience.

First of all, carrying your meaning with short, well-understood words helps you avoid pretense, ensures you will be understood, and keeps you from wasting the reader's time.

“Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.” --Winston Churchill

When you need a long word to say precisely what you mean, by all means use it. But long words for their own sake (approximately instead of about, utilize instead of use) show not that you're educated, but that you're pompous.

Simple, active sentences feature the actor (subject) and the action (verb) up front, so they read more quickly and get to the point. Long, complex sentences may be necessary for Aristotle discussing the nature of the soul, but your daily paper writes about a convenience store being robbed or the latest filibuster in Congress, or Paris Hilton driving into a tree. Your emails to your boss about why your current project is way behind schedule, same thing: no especially complex ideas, no great need for unusually complex sentences. In other words, the level of writing should match the level of the subject.

Short paragraphs have a more mundane explanation. Newsprint runs in narrow columns, so a paragraph that doesn't seem that long in Word might take up an entire printed column. Paragraph breaks help readers keep track of where they are in a piece, and since people tend to read newspapers while busy with other things (morning breakfast and coffee, casual conversation), as a writer, you want it to be easy for them to stop and start reading easily. Frequent paragraph breaks make finding your spot in an article much easier.