Here’s the payoff quote in Michael Wolff’s Vanity Fair story:
In this public-utility age of newspapers, the institutional blandness which resulted–reporters themselves, once clever and disreputable, became something like public-service employees, seeing themselves with the beleaguered virtue of schoolteachers–helped turn newspapers into a medium for old people (newspapers are for people who remember newspapers). In some sense, newspapers became the inverse of media: designed not to be noticed.
Like I said in November, if newspapers (as opposed to newspaper companies) want to survive, they have to return to the free-wheeling scrappy days of the 1920s. One new rule would be not to hire college graduates, especially journalism graduates.
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