It's Not the New York Times

Among the biggest media stories going, it surely seems to me, is the end of the New York Times. The verities not just of journalism but of the establishment itself -- nurtured, and in part created, by the New York Times -- necessarily change. This seemed so large to me that, not too long ago, I proposed the Times' decline and fall as a natural book topic. The response among various publishers was practically unanimous: Not enough people would be interested.

It's just the last of the Times Mohicans. Everybody else has moved on.

That is why it will be a minor-most story that, yesterday, the Times announced a paring of 100 jobs and salary cuts of 5%. What this is, of course, is the first of many stages of cuts, which, doled out piecemeal as they have been at every paper across the nation, will reduce the Times to an imitation of itself. If few people care about the end of the Times, fewer still will notice that it is ending.

This seems like tragedy but is probably not.

Continue reading at newser.com

Comments

[traveller77]

The internet did not kill the Times. The Times killed the Times.

The Times hasn't been the real NY Times for about ten years. They killed themselves by refusing to cover major, important stories through the Bush Administration, from the Florida vote, neoCon tax cuts, the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, the torture issue and ongoing political corruption that has compromised our Democracy, engineered in Washington DC. Locally, their coverage of 9-11 and Wall Street stopped well short of actually telling the truth to their subscribers (or to the rest of us), and we've all paid dearly over the last eight years for their foolish journalistic compromises.

We are not surprised when we see poor journalism practiced at hundreds of other dailies around the country -- but the Times claimed to meet a higher standard. Their fall is therefore more more disasterous, more public, and feels more like betrayal to all of us who were not informed of important current events in time to protect ourselves from what we are experiencing now.

tr77

[shamanbart]

I couldn't agree more - well said! I would say though not that they didn't cover those stories, but that they didn't factually cover them -- i.e., calling torture torture, calling Neocon war policy fraudulent and tax cuts disasterous, not exposing the corruption in the financial industry as such.

When we start to see the kind of anti-status quo, investigative journalism that was once a hallmark of the NY Times, we might see these organizations gain a foothold in online media.

I'm also surprised the newspapers haven't banded together and come up with a Kindle-type device for electronic news... But I guess that says a lot about their collective imaginations.

[realpolitic]

The decline of the print media is not the fault of the media itself but of the internet. The print media made most of its money from advertisements which drifted over to the internet. Also, people seem to be reading less or less engaged with civic affairs and the print medium. With shorter attention spans, people read less. The loss of the New York Times and many of our big city newspapers is a great loss indeed. When there is no more factually based press and we are left to the likes of Fox News we will become a nation of idiots.

[traveler501]

I cancelled my subscription back when they were pushing the WMD nonsense in the buildup to Iraq. The Times died years ago...sadl­y, but it did.

[indyleftist]

The NYTimes is pretty much a worthless paper anyway

They are consistently pro-war and unquestioning about foreign policy
They are consistently pro "free trade" and unquestioning about our economic policy

This is an opportunity not a setback. All the people complaining about the mainstream media's self censorship and conventional wisdom monkeys, this is your chance. You don't get more mainstream media than the NyTimes

[hyjanks]

If it's an imitation of itself, that must mean it's pretty much . . . itself! Maybe a better phrase is in order here, like: Most of the News That's Fit To Print.

[apoyo]

It's a tragedy as far as the end of the idea of the New York Times.

In actual fact, probably not so much. The people who made it prominent are no longer there.
Now it is more the Times of Judy Miller, Jason Blair, Bill Kristol and Thomas Friedman.

[Clavis]

At a certain point, the press became "the media".

Our Founding Fathers didn't write the press into the First Amendment because they wanted it to be easier for Rupert Murdock to turn a buck. They did it because, at the time at least, the press had the potential to serve as the fourth estate, to check the excesses of the other three branches.

Could today's media be any less of a check on the excesses of government? Could it be less journalistic, less investigatory, less courageous and less insightful than it is at this moment? I don't think so.

The crumbling of America is partially a crumbling of American intelligence, skepticism and principles, and this crumbling is helped along immensely by the monopolization, collusion and corruption of our press outlets.

The home of Edward R. Morrow, Benjamin Franklin and H.L. Mencken -- the press -- has become the home of Wolf Blitzer, Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan. I'm almost tempted to say "Good riddance".

[aOsO]

Yup, Times is done.