"There isn't as much passion and outrage in today's newspapers. That may be because of a corporate decision, but they've lost their personality"
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Gartner is mourning a lost texture of public life: the newspaper as a living, argumentative institution rather than a content pipeline. “Passion and outrage” isn’t a plea for hotter takes so much as a defense of voice - the sense that a paper stood for something, picked fights, and sounded like humans with convictions rather than a brand with risk controls. Coming from a veteran editor, the line doubles as both nostalgia and indictment: the newsroom didn’t just get quieter; it was quieted.
The key phrase is “corporate decision,” delivered with the tight, reporterly restraint that makes it sting. He doesn’t need to name the forces - consolidation, advertiser sensitivity, legal departments, shareholder logic, metrics - because the audience can supply them. The subtext is that editorial temperament has been outsourced to management strategy: outrage becomes a liability, passion a variable to be smoothed out for scale.
“Personality” is the tell. Gartner frames the loss not as ideology but as character. That’s shrewd, because it sidesteps partisan debates about bias and goes after something harder to quantify but easy to feel: the flattening effect of homogenized news products. When every paper adopts the same neutral tone, the same wire-heavy sameness, readers don’t just lose a viewpoint; they lose a relationship.
Context matters: Gartner came up in an era when local papers were monopolies with swagger, and editors had room to be muscular. His critique lands in today’s environment of collapsing revenues and constant reputational landmines, where playing it safe can seem like survival. He’s arguing that safety has a cost: a press that no longer sounds like it believes its own stakes.
The key phrase is “corporate decision,” delivered with the tight, reporterly restraint that makes it sting. He doesn’t need to name the forces - consolidation, advertiser sensitivity, legal departments, shareholder logic, metrics - because the audience can supply them. The subtext is that editorial temperament has been outsourced to management strategy: outrage becomes a liability, passion a variable to be smoothed out for scale.
“Personality” is the tell. Gartner frames the loss not as ideology but as character. That’s shrewd, because it sidesteps partisan debates about bias and goes after something harder to quantify but easy to feel: the flattening effect of homogenized news products. When every paper adopts the same neutral tone, the same wire-heavy sameness, readers don’t just lose a viewpoint; they lose a relationship.
Context matters: Gartner came up in an era when local papers were monopolies with swagger, and editors had room to be muscular. His critique lands in today’s environment of collapsing revenues and constant reputational landmines, where playing it safe can seem like survival. He’s arguing that safety has a cost: a press that no longer sounds like it believes its own stakes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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