Sublime

by Carlos A. Gomez-Uribe and Neil Hunt.

most of us have succumbed to Will Ferrell’s seductive proposal in Anchorman 2: “What if we didn’t give people the news they needed to hear, but instead gave them the news they wanted to hear.”

While the aughts were a time of massive trauma in nearly all areas of public life—caused by war, terrorism, duplicitous governments, and a mass-media system that was breaking down and drifting toward an à la carte “choose your own reality” pluralism—it still felt like the Internet was a place where truth, intelligence, and individuality might still

mean anything at all. On the front page of the gray old Times, I’m liable to encounter a chatty article about frying with propane gas. CNN lavished hours of airtime on a runaway bride. The magisterial tones of Walter Cronkite, America’s rich uncle, are lost to history, replaced by the ex-cheerleader mom style of Katie Couric. One reason the notion

of the New Journalism (which put a new emphasis on the voice and point of view of the reporter),

When the blogger Andrew Sullivan switched his site to a subscription model a few years ago, his analysis of the situation was striking. He called subscription the “purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews . . . just a concept designed to mak