I spend a lot of time on the road nowadays and can't get a feel from any place I stay from reading the papers. And if I try to get an advance feel by reading their Web sites, it's even worse. Even the Washington Post uses AP wire coverage for Washington news, both in print and on their Web site. The other half is, simply, we are bumping up against the ceiling of our operational capability. That these stories are there at all is a combination of semi-automation and brute force.
Special treatment is a time luxury.
As a culture, we're praising diversity, but in our journalism, we're producing more sameness. It could be one year or five years away, but the Internet will make major inroads into this market and disrupt the current economic model for newspapers. In fact, the profits from a strong classified section are often higher than the total profits of the newspaper, Klein writes. How soon will this become a problem. Well, let's look at the example of cars.