That "art" had a purpose, a social function. Tabloids had very real effects of starting popular wars, similar to how the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts were sta

That "art" had a purpose, a social function. Tabloids had very real effects of starting popular wars, similar to how the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts were started. It's a lot of speeches and rhetoric, very little concrete information. Now society is changing, much of that function is replaced by "scientific literature." Fewer reasonable people go into the wild world of tabloid journalism, punditry and politics. There's competition now, pop science can fill those niches. It's entertaining enough while being more informative. Writers overall are closer to the punditry end of the spectrum. They express themselves first and get the details later. Scientists get the details first. Their culture is becoming dominant through technology, through extreme real world effects. Writers as a culture will either catch up or become irrelevant. The frameworks of thought they tend to use are obsoleting. The real problem writers face is not whether a new medium will make them less powerful, it's whether their profession should have power in its current form. People will pay for information that has a measurable effect on society, without which it falls apart. They will pirate what doesn't.