Yglesias says "people in the 'writing about important things' business need to roll up our sleeves and try harder to make our output compelling to people":
In the print world, I think people got too complacent about the idea of reporting out a worthy story, plopping it on page A3, and forgetting about it. Was anyone actually reading that story? It’s not clear to me that they were. On the web if you want people to read worthy journalism it’s made clear that this is actually a two-step process. First you have to produce the worthy content, and then you have to get someone to read the worthy content.
Ezra Klein counters:
Stories about payment fraud in Medicare will never dominate “most popular” lists. But so long as they’re in a publication that regulators and hospitals fear, they can have an impact -- even if the vast majority of the paper’s readers never notice them.