What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news except to tell you what happened overnight and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen.
I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.
If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.