Just a quick reaction to the changes announced by Observer editor Rick Thames and edit page editor Ed Williams — Hooray!
A couple months back we wondered when the Observer would catch on to what their North Carolina newspaper peers had long figured out, that readers like to consume opinion journalism online. The fact that it is much less expensive to present opinions online versus print them on paper and truck them around is just a bonus, but cost is clearly the reason this outpost of the Knight Ridder empire has gone in a new direction. Ain’t market discipline grand?
In any event, the next step in a meaningful transformation would be to drop the tax-and-spend dogma and view public policy questions with the same cost-conscious common sense the Observer deploys on in-house business decisions.
We’ll be watching.
