Elephant Diaries: On Feeling Outnumbered

We’ve always been outnumbered. It’s getting worse: Packs of lobbyists fill two rooms outside the House and Senate chambers in Richmond every afternoon, watching the proceedings on big video screens, zapping legislators with e-mails the instant the lobbyists sense that one of their bills might be in trouble. The interest groups that hire lobbyists can …

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Elephant Diaries: The Railroad Metaphor

There’s a cliche that keeps popping up in the discussion of newspapers’ futures that links the fate of my business today with railroads of old. Railroads, the argument goes, lost out to the trucking industry because they thought they were in the railroad business, rather than the transportation business. Newspapers, by analogy, are failing because …

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