Letters to the Editor
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The News Business Is a Business
The mass media wants to be like Drudge because they perceive that Drudge has the eyeballs on the screen and that's what brings in the dough.
Running the media as a business is not inherently a bad thing; it is a business, after all.
But running a business doesn't necessarily mean you know how to run a business properly, especially for the long term.
It is instead the flock of birds approach. Oh look! Food over there, everybody go that way. No wait! Food over there! Fly there, everybody!
In the long run, it pays to really service your customer's needs and desires. If you are merely following the latest fad based on superficialities (oo, people like Drudge-like political gossip, don't ask why or what else they might want), as the media clearly is, you will lose those eyeballs, just as TV and print are, indeed, losing customers.
Oh, plus it's way easier to give an off-the-cuff opinion about bowling and haircuts than to read hundreds of pages of boring old documents.