Quote, unquote: Newspapers and better steaks

“Newspapers had been running the equivalent of a very nice high-end steakhouse.Then McDonald’s moved to town and started selling untold numbers of cheap hamburgers. Newspapers thought, 'Let’s compete with that,' and dropped the steak for hamburger, even though it had no real expertise in producing hamburgers. What they should have done is improve the steak product.”

 -- H. Iris Chyi, quoted by Jack Shafer of Politico from a new paper she wrote with Ori Tenenboim of the University of Texas, published this summer in Journalism Practice. Its thesis is that the web-heavy strategy pursued by most newspapers has been a bust.