I cannot help but be struck by the similarity of this to the demise of the large department stores at the hands of specialty stores. Department stores offered higher quality when no one was around to compete product for product. But their ultimate shortcoming was meanness of their products. The department stores sold things of average quality to most people. How could they compete with small stores that were tailored to people’s specific demands?

The newspapers are the same way. When you hear things like, “the NYTimes is a quality publication” it means that the average quality is good, not the specific quality for a given article. Even the NYTimes cannot afford to employ all the greatest minds of our age. In addition, there is no way the NYTimes is going to cover, in depth, the interests of subcultures (which had their own means of gathering and spreading news even before the Web made the Net popular). They are in depth enough for experts and not simple enough for casual readers. In effect, the NYTimes is right for no one.