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Comment by Stronico | Hacker News Reader

I read a print version of the NYT recently and the feeling I got was quite different than the web version - mostly in that what was being pushed on you was "news", not opinion. Almost all of it could be described as "These People Did This Thing In This Place". It was great actually, dispassionate and informative. The editorials were packed away somewhere in the back, not worth looking for. A very different experience than the web version.

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I still don't understand why any news org has an opinion page. The two have nothing to do with one another.

In a lot of the world, they don't really have unbiased newspapers. Except for the BBC, newspapers in the UK openly fly their colours for example.

It's in the article: Opinion at NYT produces 10% of the output, but 20% of the views. Emotions, especially negative ones, drive engagement.

Sadly this is the answer.

It's where values-based analysis can happen.

"Person X did Y on Z date" is a perfectly fine information properly residing in the news section. Writing about what the consequences of Y are very easily leaves the purely factual space once Ys consequences reach a certain complexity.

Consider the role of newspapers historically. It's not unreasonable to expect an institution of reporters of current events to have a section of opinion and analysis on the facts of the day.

That may seem antiquated now, with an unlimited amount of opinion readily available on social media or advocacy websites.

What newspapers did historically was mostly just possess the very expensive printers and delivery networks required to distribute media to large numbers of people, right? It would make sense for such organizations to distribute news, opinion, sports info, financial info, comics and other entertainment, etc.

It’s tempting to think that their real value was always the reporting itself, but then how do we explain why technologies like the internet (and even TV before that) have seemed to massively disrupt their business model?

I get the Sunday Washington Post. I get the same feeling there as well. The online version has more sensationalist headlines and articles, and also publishes opinion columns that never make it into print (like Hugh Hewitt and Marc Theisson) for the outrage clicks.

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