Newspapers are changing to suit readers’ tastes
By Tim Rutten Read Spanish Version
Los Angeles Times
Sooner rather than later, the newspaper you’re holding in your hands will be very different from what it is today.
Different in what way is the fair and obvious question.
The honest answer is that nobody knows for certain, but the odds are it will be a hybrid publication in which an online edition that’s focused mainly on breaking news and service works in tandem with a print edition whose staples are analysis, context and opinion. The former almost surely will have a lot more video and interactivity than it does today; the latter will have to be much more thoughtful and far more intensely and carefully edited. […]
As they give themselves over to more analysis and commentary, newspapers will have to be more vigilant about being genuinely honest brokers of ideas, opening their news columns to a far broader spectrum of serious opinions and perspectives — liberal to conservative — than even the best of them do now. Politicization is the enemy rather than the logical consequence of that process.
Newspapers can distinguish themselves from the current undifferentiated cacophony of substantial and frivolous opinion on the Internet — and best serve their readers — by insisting that their analysis and commentary conform to the discernible facts. In a society that seems more deeply and reflexively divided along partisan lines, that would be more than a service.
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