I missed this in August from Rich Gordon:

On the Web, though, newspapers have clearly emphasized news first.
Which is a big part of the reason why so few people visit newspaper Web
sites.

Yep, more news means fewer visitors..

News junkies like all the news choices they have, but others do not. Gordon points to Markus Prior of Princeton University estimate that only 10 to 15 percent of Americans are news junkies.

The news junkies, however, are the users that move the metrics and we focus even more on what they want because they are generating more pageviews and longer times on site. And thus we have less of what more casual news consumers want. Sort of like drinking ourselves to death?