From a Hartford Courant story today:
“[Newspaper] Editors still block sexually explicit and violent content, deciding how much detail readers and viewers need. But the Internet has blown the gates open, and editors, with their increasingly impotent red pencils, have seen readers rush past them into the wide open Web to find out for themselves what “salacious” means.
“I think if they’re smart, [mainstream newspapers] are going to change,” said Bob Norman, a columnist for New Times, an alternative newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “I’m not saying they have to print all the salacious details, but I think if they’re going to keep up with the general trend of keeping more real, toward telling the truth no matter how ugly it might be, they’re going to have to change.
“Otherwise,” Norman said, “they’re going to have to cede more influence to the Internet, and I wonder if it’s not inevitable anyway.”