I don’t like blogging triumphalism or gloating about the death of the “print dinosaurs”, but it is true that a large part of the difficulties many newspapers find themselves in is due to their own actions. Or, in other words, who would want to pay to read George Will when you can have your intelligence insulted for free online:
And most bizarrely, no one has forced folks to create a star system of punditry, despite the fact that the only unique advantage major media possesses over the digital wild west is a knowledge of journalistic craft and the institutional infrastructure that supports sustained inquiry and local and or investigative reporting.
But that’s a disastrous miscalculation. Training up an institution to do real reporting well is hard — and would provide one distinctive competitive advantage over independent knights of the keyboard. Opinion writing does not. Anyone, even yours truly, can take a whack at it; over time big, fixed cost dinosaurs can compete on neither quality nor quantity (or, as we say in my house — both Rock and Roll.)