Jill Abramson -- who worked for three years (2011-14) as executive editor of The New York Times, has now written a book, Merchants of Truth, about the changes in the news business in the last decade, one that offers important context to some of the headline political events of our day. I'll discuss the major contentions of the book in this post, then the controversy around it (especially over plagiarism) in the next. To be blunt, the major contentions are two. The first is that some of the website-only news sources, like Vice News , may seem like the way of the future, but have inherent crippling weaknesses. The second is that some of the traditional print-media news sources, like her old employer or its rival, the Washington Post , may seem antiquated but in fact they are renewing themselves in valuable ways. Abramson’s book has much to say about Jeff Bezos, though it was published in advance of the two most recent Bezos-related news stories: his blowing th...