Wednesday, 9 January 2002 : "sports != news"

[The New York Times] turning sports upside down and slapping it on the back of Metro ... did more than just iron out a production wrinkle. Unintentionally or not, it was also an astute commentary on a long-standing journalistic problem, which is that news about sports is not really news at all -- not, at any rate, in the sense that news about politics, economic and social developments, and international affairs is news.

Sports, after all, is essentially a subcategory of the for-profit entertainment industry ... The fact that one set of highly paid entertainers gets more points than another set of highly paid entertainers on a given day, while of surpassing and perfectly legitimate interest to many people, is not of great moment.