The Quote
“The best of the political bloggers are easily the equal of the opinion columnists at the New York Times. I don’t see the added value there and question whether a newspaper should be paying large sums of money for that anymore”. Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales at Guardian’s Changing Media Summit.
I think Jimmy is wrong here; great columnists are a key part of news brands, but he’s on to something about the economics of it. How much are you paying who, and how much are they yielding. Good questions, and ones that need to be asked.