Laughing Outloud

I know you have to consider the source -- it was an article in Time ("in partnership with CNN") -- and the author -- Michael Kinsley -- but I am still laughing at Kinsley lecturing newspapers on what their future might be and then adding this.

I'm not sure what that new form will look like. But it might resemble the better British papers today (such as the one I work for, the Guardian). The Brits have never bought into the American separation of reporting and opinion. They assume that an intelligent person, paid to learn about some subject, will naturally develop views about it. And they consider it more truthful to express those views than to suppress them in the name of objectivity.

In other words, the elites at the paper will tell you what they know and that's all you need to know.   This from a man whose one abortive attempt at working at a newspaper didn't last very long.   The journos are still smirking and sneering.  

The Guardian is a "better British paper"?   Excuse me, but the last time I checked it was not even commercially viable.   It is funded by a trust.   Guardian journalists have been found to be repeatedly engaged in outright propaganda.   One of their interns was happily writing for a jhadist group.   Maybe to Kinsley they are one of the better British papers because they pay his salary?

In any case, the idea that Time magazine, itself an abject failure and CNN, another abject failure whose cable ratings are only slightly higher than the Shopping Network hawking celebrity perfumes, would contact a woulda-been editorial page editor for a failed newspaper to write about the future of newspapers is, well, the story of the media industry in a nutshell.