The reasons for general magazine columns should include two factors:
Easy to read quickly. When reading, you must constantly look from left to right, backward, left to right, backward, left to right, and so on. Smaller line width can make this process less tiring, because when a line of text is long, the head needs to rotate slightly to keep the line of sight consistent with the text, and when you return to the beginning at the end of the line, it will take a lot of effort to find the next line. The smaller line width transforms the horizontal movement of the line of sight into continuous vertical movement, which is beneficial to improve the reading speed. Periodical magazines and newspapers with strong timeliness like column layout, because the purpose of reading these publications is to browse quickly and get a lot of information as soon as possible.
Improving typesetting efficiency means putting more words on each page. Although adding a space in the middle of a column seems to be a waste of space, in fact, single-column typesetting requires more space, because the larger the text block, the more space around it is needed to compensate for visual pressure. By dividing a large text block into two or more columns, the total white space required by the page is actually smaller. Moreover, because the text blocks become smaller after column division, the pressure between words is also reduced, which can reduce the line spacing without being too crowded, and is also conducive to improving typesetting efficiency.