"The New York Times has become a newsletter read only by the elite and the elderly..."
You mean, read only by the pretentious and ugly, don't you?
Actually, newsletters are the state of the art, ranging from bad to the genre of these times. The art of communications is newsletters, email, electronic posting/blogs. The newspaper was the state of the art in the nineteenth century, got displaced by television and radio in the twentieth century, and are still trying to convince themselves that history always repeats itself and they will be the Next Big Thing -- so hang on to your shares and jobs at your local newspaper.
Meanwhile, history and life has passed them by. Diligent monitors of literature on all the media will note that perusing the mass media for valuable information becomes less productive with each passing day. Most of it is just things you don't need to know and are just wasting your time.
The real communications and information is coming increasingly from the newsletters, emails, postings, blogs. The quality depends on what your personal network is. The mass media has monopolized a market people are questioning whether it has any value at all. Is there still a major mover or thinker in their readership after they've suppressed all the voices but their own? -- and judging from their letters to the editor, they're still searching for signs of intelligent life. They drove off the intelligent readers to these emerging alternative forums which was the predictable stupid mistake.
By insisting that they had to be on top of the pecking order, they had to shrink the pond so small, that it became a puddle against the vast background of an ocean of information that they could not control. They set the rules, but everybody else decided not to play their game. Their confusion and anomie is palpable.
Thanks Mike. (Nice to hear from you again!) You're absolutely right. What a well reasoned comment on your part. The old media was dreaming, if they imagined that they could continue to insult the intelligence of the public without consequence. As Bernard Goldberg rightly states ("Bias" & "Arrogance"), they all live in the same hermitically-sealed "elite" bubble - coctail and dinner parties on the upper east side in NYC, in D.C. and out on the left coast.
They ignored the "fly-over" folks, and now that appalling insult has come back to bite them. You can tell by the way they are now scratching their collective wooden heads, trying to "reach out" to small town America. I'd say they're more than a day late and many dollars short in their new campaign to win over hearts and minds. "Fly-over" people are into the 21st century and have long since figured out "old media's" agendas.