I agree with Omidyar here. Not that I'm particularly interested in sports and entertainment: when I read the paper on line, I go straight to whatever I'm interested in (often politics, econ, etc..). Nevertheless, I thing one of the goal of this new venture is to make sure as many people as possible are aware of what's wrong with political powers. A gross restatement of their objective would be: make sure the people feeding on Fox News get another source of information, a reliable one. So they're practicing a foot-in-the-door technique: provide quality journalism for popular topics, and hope that when people browse their site, they will be more likely to stumble on important news they would otherwise have missed.

More generally, I'm very excited and hopeful about this project. It is a truly innovative experiment in an aging industry, and I hope it succeeds. For the first time in my life I'm considering subscribing to a newspaper..