A reader writes:
Kinsley misses the point completely. So the reason newspapers are failing is because they bother to give historical context in the articles? No. Plenty of blog posts do that as well. What's killing many newspapers is that they developed in a world where every local area read it's own newspaper. The pages of the newspaper could be filled by regurgitating wire stories because they were still news to the people in the local area. Newspapers didn't have to invest money in a lot of journalism except to cover the local beats where they weren't getting wire stories that already covered it for them.
To illustrate my point, google any major news story. Hundreds of stories will appear and all of them will say almost the same thing. The paragraphs may be in a different order, but the quotes, and many of the words are verbatim because they are just regurgitating wire stories. Seeing as people can get their news directly from the source, they don't need those hundreds of rehashes of the story. The newspapers themselves end up seeming out of date an irrelevant because so much of their content is just the same thing in paper form. Blogs provide value to the articles by adding their own spin and analysis rather than just reordering the paragraphs.
Newspapers don't suffer because their articles are written poorly, they suffer because they don't add enough value. The newspapers that do original reporting, investigation, and analysis are the ones that will survive because people will see a value in paying for them. If Kinsley had it right, then all of these papers would simply have to go back and change their writing style for their articles. Does anybody really believe that would save them?
The Dish 