Stuff like journalistic objectivity, being a strong editorial voice, and so on disconnects newspapers from their audiences and is arguably responsible for some of the industry’s problems once Web 2.0 broke out.

The above is part of one of the responses I received during a recent back and forth in various blogs about the “core product” of newspapers. I objected to the idea that our core product is simply “delivering a commercially relevant audience to advertisers.” When people who supposedly are trying to save and improve newspapers make statements like this, I start becoming more concerned about our friends than about our detractors.

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