Media Blog's Business Plan for the NY Times
Media Blog
Stephen Spruiell Reporting
I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt a little schadenfreude about the news that the NY Times is laying off 500 people. MB reader Greg writes:
Funny that when the United States is running at a loss,
ie, a budget deficit, the NY Times' editorial board would
suggest tax increases on the rich. But when the NY Times,
Inc. runs at a loss, rather than tax the rich, ie, cut
Krugman's salary, they fire the worker bees. Again, when
threatened with financial penalties over Judith Miller,
the Times said they'd put Miller above shareholders. But,
employees who've committed no crime, the shareholders
come before them. Where's John Edwards and the "Two NY
Times Speech"?
We already know that Tom Friedman makes $300,000. How much are they paying Paul "America hates the poor because we're racist" Krugman?
I've got a few suggestions for the Times: First, ditch the TimesSelect thing ASAP. In a world where print media and even TV are losing out to digital media, the last thing you want to do is drive people away from your Web site. Take a lesson from the blog-friendly Washington Post
Second, make your op-ed page appeal to grown-ups again by reassigning Frank Rich to the Style section, giving Maureen Dowd a fiction column and firing Paul Krugman — any journalist who has shown such little respect for facts should be shown the door. Use whatever you were paying him to keep a few of the real journalists you're planning to lay off.
And finally, use every effort at your disposal to erase the legacy of Howell Raines. Even though Bill Keller is a different kind of editor, you can still see the legacy of Raines. As Seth Mnookin reports in Hard News, Raines was an editor who valued buzzworthiness over newsworthiness and preferred to use the Times to launch crusades rather than report the news.
On the latter point, readers of this blog don't need me to provide an example — they send me their own every day. For an example of the former, though, read Jack Shafer's analysis in Slate of the Times latest buzzmaker, "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood." Shafer:
<<<
To say Story's piece contains a thesis oversells it. Early on, she squishes out on the whole concept with the weasel-word seems. She writes, "What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children"... [snip]
I suspect a Times editor glommed onto the idea while overhearing some cocktail party chatter—"Say, did you hear that Sam blew hundreds of thousands of dollars sending his daughter to Yale and now she and her friends say all they want in the future is to get married and stay at home?"—and passed the concept to the writer or her editors and asked them to develop it.
You can see the editorial gears whirring: The press has already drained our collective anxiety about well-educated women assuming greater power in the workplace. So, the only editorial vein left to mine is our collective anxiety about well-educated women deciding not to work instead. Evidence that the Times editors know how to push our buttons can be found in the fact that as I write, this slight article about college students is the "Most E-Mailed" article on the newspaper's Web site.
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I offer this plan because, contrary to popular opinion, I am not a New York Times hater. There are a lot of good journalists there who do outstanding work, and it's a shame that some of them are going to get laid off while Krugman continues to smirk and churn out his fact-free drivel. But in order to regain a credibility that has fallen to somewhere between Dan Rather and Counterpunch, they need to move as far away from the Raines legacy as possible.
media.nationalreview.com
editorandpublisher.com
media.nationalreview.com
select.nytimes.com
buzzmachine.com
slate.msn.com
nytimes.com
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