Best of both worlds: Open the "printer friendly" version of an article and execute the readability javascript bookmarklet: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
This is easily rectified by a single click and drag to resize the browser window to your preferred column width.
I for one much prefer print links for reading articles.
If you don't like ads, block them. I like well formatted text that doesn't require user intervention every time I go to a new page. That's sort of the entire fucking POINT of web design.
I totally agree. Unfortunately, many commercial pages present poorly-formatted text framed by blinking or brightly-colored distractions. I exercise a bit of user intervention to load the print link -- I just want the text, and I can size the column(s) easily.
Bloated pages (both visually and in terms of file size) are a problem, but linking directly to printer-friendly pages is not a suitable fix, IMHO.
Avoiding advertising also bothers me (even more than the actual advertisements bother me) in general, because I like information, and information generally costs money to acquire - especially high-quality, reliable information. Newspapers and their investigative journalism appear to be going away, and that makes me sad.
Note: I'm not familiar with Inc. magazine, so discussing quality journalism may or may not be entirely relevant in this context.