Personally I'm glad this made HN simply because it is an interesting story and I virtually never check the mainstream media. To me, the failures in the mainstream media, including focusing on kitch or faddish things that are of no particular interest to me, are always informative in the sense that I think they can help people building the next generation of news/media platforms -- empowering users to get the information that is relevant and valuable to them.

In this sense, I think this is extremely relevant, simply because I think we all know that the old newspaper model is dead, but nothing obvious has risen to replace it (besides news aggregators, either as semi-free or targeted Bloomberg-esque services).

This is, also, fairly obviously, one of those problems that has the problem of scale immediately rather than post facto, so it is interesting to explore those aspects of the problem -- insofar as there are a lot of places already reaching out to a niche audience, but nothing that obviously brings them together.