My concern is that asking whether journalism should deliver what people want vs what they need is the most direct route towards reducing journalism to irrelevance. Journalism is important precisely because it digs into things that have greater importance than most people care to attach to them. Most people don’t care that much about corporate or government abuses of power, or about the impact tomorrow of billions of dollars borrowed and spent today — they don’t perceive that it affects their lives, or they’re made uncomfortable by the subject matter, or they don’t want their existing beliefs challenged. What people want is to be comforted and entertained, and they’ve been asking their news organizations to do that for quite some time.

A lot of journalists have apparently decided they’re OK with that. But when you let the “merry actions of the free market” decide what’s news and what isn’t, you end up with what we saw yesterday: a troop surge of 30,000 US soldiers in Afghanistan getting less coverage and analysis than a golfer’s extramarital affairs. And this sort of thing has been going on for years.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a free-market proponent in most regards, and I hardly want to see the state get into the news business. But journalism is a hybrid beast: it’s a major social good, but it’s one of the very few (maybe the only?) that’s provided by the private sector. Its function and benefits are universal, but it’s a captive of the market, which is one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to fund properly. But long before the Net wrecked the current model, news was in decline — for years now, the choice and presentation of “news” has been driven primarily (and in some cases exclusively) by a desire to generate revenue, and that’s not what news is for.

We need a responsible, independent, functioning press in order to capably and effectively play our role as citizens. Nothing in that statement implies spoonfed pablum or paternalism; it’s a fact of civic life that I hear many journalists regularly invoke as their raison d’etre. Nor is there anything in that statement that says important stories can’t be well-told — of course they can, and they should be. That’s why journalism still prizes writing ability so highly, and why we don’t just go out and hire auditors and forensic accountants to serve as reporters.

We need news that sifts truth out of the endless skeins of deception, spin and trivia, and makes it available to everyone who’s interested. Maybe no one’s interested — maybe all we care about really is Tiger Woods and Lady Gaga and Adam Lambert. Fine — we can take that up with the civics teachers in school, if we can find them. But even if the market for important, necessary news is small, we still need to serve it as best we can. That’s really all I’m trying to say.

Thanks again for taking the conversation forward.