I will be impressed if you can do better than Martin Gardner. He wrote articles meant for consumption within minutes (although not 2 or 3), and provided challenges to help maintain interest. He did articles outside of Scientific American, but I don't know that Gardner could compete for audiences that read things like People magazine.
However, many magazines publish puzzles. If the topic presented include a simple easily solved puzzle and one not so easily solved, that may draw as good an audience as anything, especially if little or no "higher reasoning" is involved. Even so, squeezing a topic into two or three minutes is a challenge. At three words a second, that is less than 600 words, which fits into a MathOverflow comment. Consider a ten minute version instead.
Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2011.02.23
