I had approached the follically-challenged, bespectacled man sitting on the brown, wooden bench on a Lower Manhattan subway platform, thinking he might make a good interview.

Admittedly (and I admitted this to the man himself), the story I was nosing around about, was a light-hearted piece about…cats. It’s not hard hitting journalism and I never pretended it was.

So while I was taken aback by his rudeness and his seriously skewed view that there are “commies” in the White House, one thing struck me after this encounter: he was right about one thing.

What am I writing about and why?

Do we, the journalists, have the responsibility to write what the public wants to read? Or is it our written word that shapes the appetite for news?

There are times I am inspired by what I believe to be a journalist’s calling to shape public opinion, and to steer the public into thinking, reacting and caring about important issues.

But in a world where headlines announcing Brittany Murphy’s death trump news that Democrats have secured enough votes to pass health care reform, I sometimes lose a little faith. You want more readers to surf to your site, to pay for your paper, to subscribe to your magazine… so how do you strike a balance between hard and soft news? Between what’s easy to digest and what might be harder to swallow?