Good commentary or opinion pieces constitute parts argument, plus parts garnering of facts and take off from an awareness of issues. Thus they are both shortcut digests of news and take you into a discussion of the facts rather than presenting a "fact".

Moreover in a world where more and more news is produced, often by professionals who have partisan reasons for producing news that favours an interest, this is a good reason to value good commentary and why I return again and again to favourite people in newspapers or blogs.

Ergo I trust Charles Wright to search out info I didn't find, and to introduce and explain specialist info and debates about it, thus saving me the effort of garnering the info and specialised knowledge. (all excellent reasons to support your favourite blog I might add)

Of course another view would see commentary and opinion as mainly being about the reinforcement of prejudice, and in the case of much tabloid media, prejudice and igornance. Maybe this is also what the comment forms are for on blogs?!

I still read papers two to three days a week, plus weekends, if only to get a sense of the general news agenda. However the electronic media is of less value in many ways, TV can hardly express any ideas at all, nearly everything is delivered in predigested and already known cliches. (In general news TV functions mainly to titillate with pictures and to push various emotional buttons - primarily fear but also, righteousness, sentimentality, compassion, etc - and the radio works almost exclusively on following up print in its stories.

I find the internet useful for access to non local papers, research, and as an another source of news and info, including an archive of what I've already read. I also use it to go direct to sources used by the news media. However web pages, no matter how well designed, are less rewarding to read than papers, they have less info to a page for start. I use Acrobat to download some newspapers and even this is not as good.

I also am increasingly worried by libraries reliance on electronic lists of texts from newspapers as their "Archive" of the press, and the discarding of the actual newspapers in both paper and microfilm media. This will seriously inhibit the insights of future historians, since, as Cringley is noting, the layout and specific medium influences what and how something is read. Historians will have access to the text we were reading but not how it was arranged on the page, a large part of its context and thus its impact, will be missing.

It would be interesting to try producing multi-storied web pages more like newspaper layout in the future. But I think it remains unlikely. The small size of screens inhibited this in the past and while 20" screens are becoming affordable, and even tilt screens that can be made to shift to a long vertical are available, the rush to handhelds and mobile web is pushing against this experiment happening.