Roger Ebert: Celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think.

I agree with Ebert's points, but I would put it differently: People who persist in reading newspapers are being trained not to think. There are fewer and fewer such people, because newspapers have long since abandoned the thinking person's market.

Fortunately, this isn't the early 1990s anymore. If I want to read (e.g.) Roger Ebert I don't need to force my local paper to carry him.

I always thought Ebert was too lenient on movies (as he famously says, he goes to movies to enjoy them; I've always liked more critical film reviewers), but I've loved every article he's written for the Sun. It's made me appreciate his attitude a lot more.

In particular, his criticism for how the press handled Twilight. I lost my love for newspapers through 2006-2007 with their handling of the book series. If you haven't read them, the books are disgustingly bad; high schoolers have a better track record in terms of quality. And newspapers and "old media" never once referred to it. They'd focus only on the popularity and on the many people who liked it, which was a really self-serving story.

I really hope people start speaking up against that sort of news reporting. It's killing the news. And I think that old news is going to end up dead as the Internet gains prominent, but god - what an ugly death.

Newspapers no longer have monopoly on information, and since educated consumers are increasingly searching out alternative information sources on the web, newspapers have to concentrate on the casual reader. And the casual reader is interested in celebrity - it has always been that way, and it will always be that way. It's not making us dumb, humans have always wanted to know about their queens and aristocracy.

Challenging material, or material that only appeals to some upper crust 10% is going to move to a medium where only the 10% who are interested in it get to see it. A mass paper needs to appeal to the masses, this not only makes commercial sense, but it's logically right. If some guy has no interest in some massive review of a huge book written in big words he does not know, then why should this review be in his paper?

Being average is a good thing, and specialists should not complain that the average people are no longer interested in what they have to say. Instead, they should focus on the people who are actually interested in them.

Business idea: A daily subscription-only film review e-mail written by a collection of recently laid-off movie reviewers.

In all fairness, while most newspapers may be devolving into gossip columns, some of them still strive to maintain some dignity like WSJ, NYT, etc...