Laugh.... reading the comments, I feel like the guy in the star wars trench run that needs to keep saying "stay on target".... The real problem here is busines

Laugh.... reading the comments, I feel like the guy in the star wars trench run that needs to keep saying "stay on target".... The real problem here is business model: expected average revenue per content piece vs. expected cost of production. There's a winner-take-most dynamic in publishing revenue and audience development; top X stories get Y% of total revenue (with a huge power law effect). If you don't win top 5, you probably get almost nothing. The cost of a newsroom scales linearly with articles; very hard to get productivity as you drive scale. Your odds of finding good topics drops according to a power law. Very hard to drive pageviews of additional content with a digital audience vs. print... print would pick up the paper and read an extra couple of pages, since they already have paid for the headline article. Most digital visitors clicks out after a page. Most of the sensationalism and wading into politics / drama is an effort to stretch that business model... find content which is stickier than objective reporting. The advertising model really does drive editorial strategy: - In traditional print, I need to build a publication brand to drive subscriptions => subscriber revenue & ad pageviews. Generally points to credibility-building as the best strategy. - In free digital, emotional crazy talk actually does better than responsible journalism...