The Aspen Summit a few years ago had a forum where someone pushed for major news outlets to promote more intellectual, nuanced content, and one rep from a major

The Aspen Summit a few years ago had a forum where someone pushed for major news outlets to promote more intellectual, nuanced content, and one rep from a major network pushed back. They pointed out that the consumer of that sort of content is going to the ballet, or trying the new restaurant by some named chef, or attending the Aspen Summit, not staying at home watching 24-hour news. That sophisticated audience is out doing interesting things, they might watch occasionally, but aren't a consistent enough news audience to shape content. "We run the market test against PBS every night." Best thing I can imagine is that policy wonks writing in low subscription specialty journals are a bit like arthouse films. Sure, the indie films lose in the market to blockbusters, and wonky policy journals don't get a tiny fraction of the eyeballs of 24 hour news. But it's more likely for important new ideas to be born in the niche, experimental market than vice versa. They're losing the market test, but contributing a lot of positive externalities by influencing the influencers, they're just not able to capture all those returns.