The NYT ignored the fires because, unlike with Katrina, the story didn't lend itself to charges of government racism.

I'm not getting the point of this whining. Everybody else was reporting on the fires. ABC even pre-empted Boston Legal for some stupid "special" about the fires. Who cares?

Ooh, the Huff'n'Puffer finds the Gray Lady outdone by New Media. By New Media standards, of course, that instant analysis is more important than getting a story right, and contextualized.

I guess we won't see the NYT bothering to use its above-the-fold real estate to trumpet how its combination of scientific explanations, community effects, human-interest angles, high-impact photos etc., etc., outdid the schlock on much of TV, or the blathering of people blogging from their basements or the disjointed first-person live blogs.

Pity. It'd be fun to see them stoop to such trash.

Damn, HP is keeping a daily score of the NYT's more glaring failures to have the comment one expects from a national newspaper of record. It would be interesting to see Mr Murdoch's daily tally of the NYT's failures to publish stories which should be in the USA's newspaper of record since he proposes to publish a national newspaper of record by tinkering with the WSJ by having a more catholic view of events in the USA. SLATE & others have shown that the USA now has newspapers of record; the day of only one national newspaper of record have passed. The USA is too large & complex to make do with only one newspaper of record. The web has clearly shown that. It will be interesting to see how Mr Murdoch & the WSJ deal with that fact in Mr Murdoch's campaign to destroy the NYT.

It seems to me that the Times didn't have its own reporters readily available on the first couple of days and--God forbid--they would stoop to use an AP story!! It turns out, though, that AP stories would have been far better initially than what Randy Archibald filed on Monday and Tuesday. He obviously had to sit in his LA office and compile by phone (or crib from TV and Internet) to come up with a story that we in the heart of the fire area--San Diego--found not even up to the standard of superficiality. Now having marshalled their own reporters, they have blanketed the fires with lots of coverage. But again, to someone living in the area, there is a lack of depth to the articles today (Wednesday). And that makes me wonder about New York Times stories that we in California read about other areas of the country and take as the Gospel; well, maybe not the Gospel but we take with great trust in their accuracy and nuance. I guess it's a lesson learned to cast a far more skeptical eye to the New York Times in specific, and to all media in general.

Typical NY

if it is not NY, it is not valid

And when anything happens in NY the whole world is supposed to care