Newspapers have traded for hundreds of years on the human need to identify with a group. The perfect marriage now -- in this era of personal choice -- is individuated news with group news. Personal pages combined with traditional pages. Peter Van

"How Soccer Explains The World" by Franklin Foer (Harper Perrenial, 2005), p. 198

. . . Throughout the late twentieth century, liberal political thinkers, from the philosopher Martha Nussbaum to the architects of the European Union, have blamed nationalism for most of modernity's evils. Tribalism in a more modern guise, they denounce it. If only we abandoned this old fixation with national identities, then we would finally get past nasty ethnocentrism, vulgar chauvinism, and blood feuding. In place of nationalism, they propose that we become cosmopolitans -- shelving patriotism and submitting to government by international institutions and laws.
It's a beautiful picture, but not at all realistic. And it turns its back on a strain of liberalism that begins with John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville and continues through Isaiah Berlin. This tradition understands that humans crave identifying with a group. It is an unavoidable, immemorial, hardwired instinct. Since modern life has knocked the family and tribe from their central positions, the nation has become the only viable vessel for this impulse. . .