What should be in a newspaper?

[Gorgiewave]

There is a lot of moaning on this messageboard about celebrities and trivialities filling our newspapers. What should be in a newspaper? Politics, funny stories, sport, weather, nudie pics, philosophical meanderings, propaganda, or what.

 

If you were the editor of a national daily newspaper free to include any content, what would you include?

[I.J]

Sport.

 

And a good crossword to do on the pan.

[Geoff Kilpatrick]

I think the problem is that newspapers still haven't dealt with the impact of the internet and are dying as a result.

 

What they should be doing, in my view, is looking at high quality investigative journalism including the ability to network lots of new interactive sources. There are still good examples - the Grauniad's expose of the News of the Screws hacking for example - but they are few and far between.

 

Let's face it. Barry Anderson would never have got a job in sports journalism 20 years ago!

[Regal Kingston]

I quite like the balance between News/politics/weird and wonderful stories/entertainment/celebrity culture the Metro has but it needs to be in more depth.

 

With the sport section at least three times as large with better journos.

 

So my answer would be a thicker Metro with small features on world political issues as thats about as much I can take without being put of the article altogether.

 

And more stories like yesterdays Suns 'expose' on the First Bus driver who farted in an old womans face after she complained about his driving.

[Gabriel]

Unless they learn how to maximise advertising revenue from the Internet, people in the future will be asking: What's a newspaper? Investigative journalism does not equate with mass interest, unfortunately, so I can't see them going down that path.

 

The sense of belonging to and identifying with a particular readership no longer exists- it hardly exists in society in general- and, therefore, newspaper circulation has evaporated. It was disappearing before the arrival of the Internet, but people assume there is a direct correlation. Another contributing factor is that young people are no longer developing the ability to read lengthy texts, so fewer read books, and newspaper articles are deemed too difficult and time-consuming.

 

Newspapers, for example the NY Times and the Daily Telegraph to name but two, have quickly identified the need to switch their delivery to electronic platforms. This is a trend that will continue, but it raises questions as to what will distinguish newspapers from, say, the BBC and CNN.

 

Alas, the cult of celebrity, so venerated by the newspapers themselves, shows no signs of haemorrhaging followers, so I foresee increasing numbers of people becoming devotees of celebrity bloggers and twitters: Stephen Fry, Robert Peston.

[Perth to Paisley]

Chips!

 

Wee drop salt and sauce [not swimming]

[Denny Crane]

A return to the Cudlipp-era would be a start. The Mirror employed and nurtured guys like John Pilger and Paul Foot and would lead with hard-hitting news stories such as Britain in poverty despite the "You never had it so good claims", Pilger's expose on the Khmer Rouge and was the first western journalist in Cambodia when they were thrown out. Hard hitting sport such as speaking out against the British/Irish rugby teams playing Apartheid South Africa also featured.

Now it is celebrity pish with hard news being buried inside and sport merely being a rehash of the stage-managed press conferences that many football clubs' PR machines orchestrate.

[Csaba's Broon Shoes]

Big pair of Bristols on page 3

 

I'm a bit old fashioned but i like my newspaers with leading story of the world on the front , nice centre spread and sport on the back