I worked for newspapers for 20 years, more or less. More, if you include my internships. Less, if you don’t. But, overall, the better part of two decades.

Whatever the case, I can tell you, without reservation, that people get the news they want, and not the news they deserve. Or the news they *say* they want.

We would have reader panes and advisory boards, and they’d tell us time and time again about the news they wanted. They wanted coverage of government. They wanted to know what zoning decisions their elected officials were making. They wanted to know what their local government was voting on that would affect their tax bills.

But if you compared sales of a newspaper that had a front-page story about government misappropriation of funds or how local and state laws meant a child molester had been housed at taxpayer expense instead of having to pay his own way for years to a story about some juicy murder or trial, well, I’ll let you guess which newspaper sold out on the newsstand.

Time and again, readers would tell us the stories they wanted to see in the paper, and they expressed surprise when we informed them we’d written about he subject many times, including that very week.

So this week’s episode of The Newsroom, with the Casey Anthony trial and focus on the stupid things that people will watch, hit home.

Thing is, we all watch this and say, “why do people watch stupid things like Casey Anthony?”

That’s besides the point. They DO watch it. And you need to find a way to balance that with the “real” news.

I look forward to the second part of the blackout on the show.

But I can tell you that I know how its going to end, generally: People are not going to suddenly wake up and realize they need to pay attention to real news.

Photo via Flickr Creative Commons by NS Newsflash.