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"The lady who liked to call and complain about missing her delivery (did I mention it was a free paper?)."

Even then, the elderly ached lonely (I presume ;)

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The example of the lady on Maple Street - the one person who actually received her free community paper on that snowy day - points to the inescapable reality of the problem: human attention is the engine of the journalism business, its core deliverable. Engaging and securing people's attention drives the media business and not, as much as we might wish it to be, the pursuit and discovery of truth or even the delivery of information, accurate and complete or otherwise. Your community paper had secured a reliable claim on the attention of Mrs. Maple Street, and that attention was valuable enough to pay for the paper and ink you delivered, run the presses that manufactured the paper, pay the staff that produced it and compel the child you were out into the elements to deliver it.

All of this holds true whether the media in question is a "free" community paper or a $200 per year subscription to one of the traditional mainstream media publications.

Millions of words will be written to explore and understand the shattering and dissolution of the traditional media. It was once at least aspirationally committed to the principles you lay out above. I agree with you that it's gotten off track, and that it really was better than it is now, but that forensic inquiry is less interesting than what might come next.

Most people aren't temperamentally and intellectually oriented to the pursuit of objective truth. It's hard work, it demands patience and humility, it requires living with more ambiguity and uncertainty than we like, and it has a way of resisting simple moral narratives. In fairness, we're probably all disinclined to the pursuit of objective truth when it seems to threaten the core formulation of our identities. In any case, allegiance to the truth, to use your formulation, isn't natural. It's difficult, and it takes practice.

I'm glad you're writing about this subject. It's important. Here's a thought: maybe we should be dreaming of a new journalism, something that obeys the law of attention, but is designed for the narrow but important audience of people for whom the pursuit of objective truth is the core value proposition. It's an underserved audience. Substack is providing one way of speaking to this population but it has structural deficiencies; how many subscriptions can one person purchase? I don't think anyone has formulated a real solution to his problem. I trust the innate human appetite for truthfulness to drive us to a solution, the shape of which is still unclear. In any case we should dream big. There's a lot at stake.

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