The world doesn't suck or not. The world is. For me the world often sucks, and I realize that there is little I can do about it. I would if I could, and I try my best in my own small corner of it.

Because I was, for four years, a regular long form writer, and later a bi-weekly columnist, in the most prestigious weekly magazine supplement in my own small country, I can actually provide some first hand perspective. The newspaper the magazine belonged to was the NYT of my country, and "enjoyed" a readership of just a little over 100,000. That isn't enough to keep the paper going (it's still around, but it's uncertain for how long).

Obviously everything is on a spectrum. While I expressed myself in black and white terms in my first comment, my point is that there is little correlation between quality and success, and I stand behind it. The fact that some quality writers and musicians achieve some level of success -- some of them enjoy quite a great deal of it -- is not enough to change the overall picture. A newspaper isn't an individual writer or artists. It's a big business with very high costs. Modest success enjoyed by a writer is total failure for a newspaper, because a newspaper needs some specific measure of financial success in order to break even. For a newspaper, the outcome is often binary: live or die. It can't generate a side income like an artist could.

As to the last paragraph of your comment: I agree, but that has little bearing on the matter at hand. I love popular art, and I enjoy popular news outlets (like Gawker) immensely. But I wasn't saying that the people creating popular art aren't smart or talented. I was merely questioning whether highbrow art or journalism is economically viable. As far as art goes, we know the answer: it isn't. Pretty much every art museum in the world and every opera troupe is state supported. This may or may not be the case for journalism as the NYT practices it.

As a matter of fact, I'm not even lamenting the state of affairs. I was simply reeling against the assumption that popularity is any sign of quality; that's all.

To add a little more information about the paper business -- to those interested -- I'll explain that a newspaper survives by cross-subsidizing reporters. You maintain a bureau in France and one in Iraq. When there's something interesting going on in Iraq, people buy the paper to read about that. When something happens in Europe, people buy it for that. But the cost of the paper stays the same, and it's not a price anyone would pay for a single article. Once you unbundle the package and allow people to read (and generate revenue) for a single article, the entire business model becomes unsustainable. You simply can't pay for the guy in France with the little money generated by the guy in Baghdad. Saying something like "you should produce more interesting content" misses the whole point of how a newspaper works. You can produce all the interesting "content" in the world, but you still won't know what's going on in Europe or Iraq. You can't have "unbundled" beat reporting (although you can have unbundled, occasional, long-form magazine assignments), because maintaining eyes and ears somewhere requires a constant cost whether or not there are good stories there at the moment.