Popularity is not always a measure of merit, and, in any case, it is not static. What people click—and what they think they like—is largely a matter of what is available to them. Publics are made and maintained, not discovered preformed, like rock formations.

A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not. Maybe she would prefer to scroll through the... See more