Here is the deepest and, to many serious journalists, most disturbing truth about the future of news: The audience will control it. They will get the kind of news they choose to get. Not the kind they say they want, but the kind they actually choose.
No matter what its business model might be, journalism will fail to deliver to the broad public the civic education our society requires unless it can persuade large numbers of people to pay attention to it.
So the choice is not between giving people what they want or what they need. The challenge is to induce people to want what they need.
The answer is not to figure out how to transport 20th century news presentation into 21st century delivery mechanisms but rather to create a new rhetoric of news that can get through to the changed and changing news audience.