At Some Point, Readers Got Smarter Than Their Newspapers

Others will have more useful economic insight to add after reading this Atlantic piece on imagining a world without the New York Times. Sadly, it isn't hard to imagine, or get used to. I say this as someone who has the NYT delivered each day and assigns it in the classroom. Yet I've long tired of Sunday Styles and other features that spin the world in the image of New York elites. Of course, it's not fair to overemphasize the consumption-oriented features running throughout the paper. The NYT is distinct among American newspapers for its ability to bring long solid explorations of Darfur and other crises around the world. And yet, for people who are really interested in the world, the NYT , or any one newspaper, isn't enough. Mainstream journalism, even the elite publications, never really caught up with the rising need for complexity and discernment of segments of the news audience. Most of the current problems in the news business have been pinned on the Internet--and technology and an outlived business model are huge challenges--but there has also been a mismatch between the general mental structure of journalism and the mental maps many people are developing about the world. There's always been this lowest-common-denominator group that salivates for news of Britney and Paris, and it would be an error to claim huge numbers seek intricate analyses of international affairs. However, there have always been intillegent people in the huge middle who would have stepped up and become more engaged if journalism had been smarter about it all. The acclimation to new news forms has always been a process, and in the same way that people got used to personal finance and health news, or fluff, they could have become accustomed to substantive, citizen-oriented newsforms if that had been the primary mission of news organizations. I don't want to make it sound so simple. The problems with journalism are not unrelated to problems with education and governmental institutions, but one has to start somewhere along the loop.