[W]hy are newspapers, for instance, having such a hard time? I think it’s because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what they do. The value of a newspaper is not that it gives me information; the value of a newspaper is how it selects information – what it puts in and what it leaves out. [From Hugh McGuire: Porn Knows What It’s For — Do You?]
It used to be that editors and publishers had an idea why they were publishing a newspaper at all (Ralph McGill’s “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is hard to top). Now I’m not so sure. Is it because of the increase in corporate ownership, where a newspaper might be owned by some conglomerate with its own agenda?