Viewspapers

First Michael Kinsley and now Frances Sellers, an editor at the Washington Post, writing in American Journalism Review advocating American Newspapers embrace the British newspaper model.  Not the broadsheets, however, but the Independent and the Guardian, both leftwing papers.

Of course, it doesn't help that Sellers describes the Independent (circ "only around 260,000") as "financially strapped" and "fourth out of the mainstream four" and the Guardian (circ 380,000) isn't economically viable and has to be funded by a trust.  Pointing to Robert Fisk as an asset is also revealing.  Fisk is so unreliable that to "fisk" something is to refute it step by step without much effort at all.  She actually admires the Independent's "promotion of views over news" fondly calling the two papers "viewspapers" and seems to admire their "business strategy".  (Being strapped is a business model?  Being funded by a trust is a business strategy?)

The one admission Sellers makes is that American papers are suffering "crises of trust" due to renewed "questions about whether American papers' claims of fairness are a cover for pushing a political agenda."   Nevertheless, she thinks U.S. papers ought to follow lefty British papers.   Like this.

We thought they already had.