I want to take issue with that statement. I see it repeated in many places, but usually it has either anecdotal evidence, or, in this case, no evidence to back it up. Was the population better informed when traditional newspapers were at their peak (let's say from 1900 to 1960)? How would you measure such an ambiguous term like "informed"? I think there's a lot of unanswered questions about the "informedness" of the average person, and it's not at all clear that the average person was more informed, in any sense, during the height of newspaper dominance than they are today.

Let's also not forget that newspapers were often just as "bad" (in terms of publishing trivial stories or publishing biased stories) as the Huffington Post is today. You just need to look at the history of "yellow journalism" to see it.