Broken link.
That link takes me to a "domains for sale" page.
Or maybe you shoot at the generals, not the lieutenants.
"Here's the identity crisis: when the president is attacking it with all the media available to him, can the Times count on this new reader, and the advertisers who are courting him, not to doubt it?"
I don't recall the President attacking the NYT. And the notion that the President commands any other media outlet or the advertisers is simply too ridiculous for words.
The NYT's troubles are its own creation.
LOL! What a freakin joke. How many times has Bush commented on the NYT through his spokespeople, once or twice?
This is like sitting in on a private conversation among utterly deluded leftists. Who tell each other all the right things.
Their hate for ordinary Americans outside of their little group is something they usually try to keep a secret.
I found this article quite disappointing given Wolff's reputation as the ultimate insider. The facts are mostly well known and his commentary is a tissue of cliches.
Thanks for the great excerpts.
This is perhaps the most poorly constructed sentence I have ever read. Where did Wolff learn grammar? He gets paid to write. Presumably, someone gets paid to edit him. Unbelievable.
For me, the money quote is:
The right-wing editorialists at The Wall Street Journal, which also printed the story about the banking secrets, ...The WSJ based it's decision to publish that story on the prior decision of the NYT. But Wolff leaves that aside in his effort to portray the WSJ as hypocritical, as, of course, are all conservatives. And, as so many of these articles do, it supposes that "we all KNOW" that Bush is a jerk, that we Red Staters who don't read the times really aren't smart enough to understand and agree with it, and so forth.
(Emphasis added, duh.)
The "sub-text", as always, is that we are bigoted, stupid, knee-jerk, unimaginative, and totally lacking in the finer perceptions of nuance, irony, and that special sophistication which arises from just being better than everyone else and which leads finally to existential ennui and immobile passivity in the face of one's deserved an inevitable destruction.
Why can't these idiots understand that a newspaper which held up on the analysis and tried it's level best to tell the TRUTH would succeed wildly? I guess that's too simple for them. .
Vanity Fair, indeed! Vanitas vanitatum.
This is one of the happiest articles about the NY Times I have ever read.
Happy for me that is.
WTF is the Slimes thinking investing in a white elephant office building when it's likely they wont need the space down the road?!
.....one that causes people inside the Times to gulp—is that difficult, less-than-humble, not-ready-for-prime-time descendants of 19th-century newspaper owners have been the cause of the decline and fall of a great many newspapers.....
Ouch!! Ithink I see blood on the floor.
You have done a yoeman's job posting the news defining the Death Watch, but this is without doubt the best of all. Vanity fait.....just imagine the pain and suffering anf oughtright embarassment this piece will cause.
It's wprthy of a ping to all the old guys
Typical left...the world is soo wrong...they know just how to change it and fix it...if only we would pay attention!!!Sheesh!!! Basically substance abuse "thinking".....
The Internet has been coming on for ten years now, but these dinosaurs have ignored its democratic power and now they can't react.
Here's the money quote for me:
The Times, in newsprint form, with its daily 1.1 million circulation, and Sunday 1.7 million, makes between $1.5 and $1.7 billion a year (the company does not break out the exact figure). Times.com, with its 40 million unique online users a month, likely makes less than $200 million a year. Cruelly, an online user is worth much less—because his or her value can be so easily measured—than a traditional reader.
Translation: we've overcharged our print advertisers for years because we had the only available ad vehicle, and were at our mercy; now, they know what ads work and who clicks on them, so they refuse to pay more. We've throttled the goose that laid the golden egg.
That's a well-written article by Michael Wolf.
My main problem with the article is that Wolf, with no real evidence, paints a clever Bush conspiracy - - orchestrated of course by the ultimate bad guy, the man behind the curtain, Karl Rove - - to stealthily kick the Times while it's down.
Additionally, Wolf never points out that the accelerating leftward drift of the Times has led the paper to come off as downright indignant - - in-your-face indignant - - in its editorial positions. The angry, barely-controlled sputtering seen all too often these days on the editorial pages has impacted the quality of the writing. It's as if the paper has decided to dig in its heels and engage in a peeing contest with the conservative-dominated "new media" (talk radio, the internet, Fox News Channel). This childish attitude problem has very likely chased away a lot of readers, IMO.
The New York Times has become an embarrassment. I agree with Wolf that the Times' problems start at the top, with Pinch, and the paper's decline into irrelevancy and oblivion will only be hastened by his meddling.