Recent studies show that ensemble pruning works as effective as traditional ensemble of classifiers (EoC). In this study, we analyze how ensemble pruning can improve text categorization efficiency in time-critical real-life applications such as news portals. The most crucial two phases of text categorization are training classifiers and assigning labels to new documents; but the latter is more important for efficiency of such applications. We conduct experiments on ensemble pruning-based news article categorization to measure its accuracy and time cost. The results show that our heuristics reduce the time cost of the second phase. Also we can make a trade-off between accuracy and time cost to improve both of them with appropriate pruning degrees. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.