There's a lot of appeal to the analysis that says newspapers are closing and we're losing investigative reporters so why in god's name is The Washington Post publishing comic book commentary that any number of bloggers would happily provide in return for a sandwich and a Watchmen ringtone. For one thing, it's intuitive: If you're going to have fewer writers, why keep the movie reviewers? And second, it places the blame for the decline of newspapers on stupid decisions made by the newspapers. How can you take seriously an industry that laments the decline of hard news and then employs people to whine about the Watchmen?But it gets the problem backwards, I think. Newspapers would close a lot faster if they decided to cut all the things that people like to read. Take out the sports pages and deprive yourself of movie advertising and stop telling people about the nine superfoods that could anti their oxidants and you won't be able to afford copy editors, much less Dana Priest. Indeed, the problem for newspapers is that all the stuff that isn't Dana Priest -- the movie reviews and the real estate listings and the sports columns and the classifieds and the restaurant guides -- can now be found elsewhere, and those were the features that ensured readers and advertising dollars and thus cross-subsidized that unpleasant three-part series on AIDS in Eastern Europe. The question no one seems quite able to answer is how, without a monopoly on the frivolous content, you fund the important content. But consciously reducing the frivolous is probably the fastest way to destroy the dutiful. IN DEFENSE OF BAD NEWSPAPER CONTENT.
There's a lot of appeal to the analysis that says newspapers are closing and we're losing investigative reporters so why in god's name is The Washington Post publishing comic book commentary that any number of bloggers would happily provide in return for a sandwich and a Watchmen ringtone. For one thing, it's intuitive: If you're going to have fewer writers, why keep the movie reviewers? And second, it places the blame for the decline of newspapers on stupid decisions made by the newspapers. How can you take seriously an industry that laments the decline of hard news and then employs people to whine about the Watchmen?But it gets the problem backwards, I think. Newspapers would close a lot faster if they decided to cut all the things that people like to read. Take out the sports pages and deprive yourself of movie advertising and stop telling people about the nine superfoods that could anti their oxidants and you won't be able to afford copy editors, much less Dana Priest. Indeed, the problem for newspapers is that all the stuff that isn't Dana Priest -- the movie reviews and the real estate listings and the sports columns and the classifieds and the restaurant guides -- can now be found elsewhere, and those were the features that ensured readers and advertising dollars and thus cross-subsidized that unpleasant three-part series on AIDS in Eastern Europe. The question no one seems quite able to answer is how, without a monopoly on the frivolous content, you fund the important content. But consciously reducing the frivolous is probably the fastest way to destroy the dutiful. 
