News is about providing readers with information. The opinion section is about providing readers with arguments. Readers use the information to become more informed, and better able to understand, respond to, disagree with, or otherwise digest the arguments. This process makes them better citizens. Journalism thus plays a very important civic function.
Unfortunately, only the last line in that paragraph is true.
When I became managing editor of the Ottawa Citizen in 2011, I started to have a lot of contact with readers — emails, phone calls, and a surprising number of handwritten letters. It was through this contact that I began to get a sense of what our readers really cared about, and what they valued in their subscription. Two things surprised me.
The first was how deeply readers cared about things like comics and puzzles, the daily weather map, horoscopes, and the TV listings. Somedays it seemed like we could have put a picture on A1 of the prime minister consorting with alien space prostitutes, but if we also printed the Sudoku upside down or got the “On this date in weather history” wrong, that is all I would hear about.