DISQUS

Nick,

Well, now I think you've gone too far in the other direction. Not driving the car? I'm guessing your readers actually want you to do that.

There are more and more point sources of news and places that collect them. They will become more popular, since a lot of people want to choose their own news, dig deeper where they want to dig rather than where someone else wants to stick the shovel. The Telegraph, the paper version especially, can't compete that way.

But, lucky for you, people want your local news, and I think they also want your point of view. If you drive, some may not ride along, but others will.

So you need to decide: homicide bomber or suicide bomber, illegal alien or undocumented worker, and more importantly which stories to write and not to write, from a reasonably stable political perspective. Do Globe readers or Union Leader readers want their paper to be free of any predictable perspective? I don't think so, even if it were possible.

So drive. Enjoy. My little nit is that although he protests much, I feel pretty certain Marty made the decision on Doonesbury because he agrees with it politically and he wants to convey its message to the readers. I don't know him, but let me take a wild guess -- he is a liberal weenie, and he is proud of it.

I'd have preferred that he'd said: This one's our choice; consider it a staff pick. But hey, not a big deal. Hope you're having fun.

Michael Q.

Nick,

In some ways this small question of yours about comics speaks to the larger issue of the recent movement away from pre-digested news (with an editor making the decisions,) which dominated the newspaper and network TV era, to peer news, like blogs and personalized news filters, that are coming to dominate the current era.

A couple years ago you asked your readers which comics should stay and which should go. One result was that they strongly said Doonesbury should go. You replied that you were keeping it anyway, and I believe that your reasoning was that you were, after all, "liberal weenies" (your words) and you thought some people like yourselves really wanted to keep it, so you were keeping it, regardless of what your readers asked you to do.

Asking a newspaper editor not to decide for readers what they should and should not see makes little sense. That's why s/he worked all those years to become editor!

But if you are going o do that, I'd suggest you just make the choice and be straight about it. It's not Dad choosing the restaurant that's so irritating. It's Dad asking where you want to go and then going where he want to go anyway that annoys.