Muffled Message?

My how things change yet stay the same.

A decade ago, major media outlets worried about being drowned out in the growing cacophony of clicks from dot-com news organizations, called by some a " product unencumbered by editors or journalistic ethics."

Today, the media elite seem to have acquiesced to being one of many voices shouting information at the public. They just want to be the one’s shouting accurate, in-depth, thought-provoking news.

"We—The Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the news outlets that aim to be aggressive, serious and impartial—don’t dominate the conversation the way we once did, and that’s fine, except it means some excellent hard work gets a little muffled," Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times said in an e-mail to The New York Observer.

Question: Just how hushed that work amid millions of page clicks?

More than three million unique visitors, for example, take a stroll through Politico.com each month—more than all but a dozen U.S. newspaper Web sites, according to The Times.

That’s not a muffled message. Sounds almost like screaming. The problem: Hundreds of other sites happen to be standing in the room shouting too.