Blogs are an improvement over newspapers because they tend to be more closely aligned with my specific interests.

Books benefit from a lengthier period of incubation: irrelevant, misleading, disingenous, sensational, or false information has a greater chance of being weeded out in a published book than in a published newspaper.

There’s a good discussion of the limitations of newspapers here on Overcoming Bias.

And as for Ms Alderman the following Thomas Jefferson quotation is relevant:

Avertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
…
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
…
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.