Posted on 10/10/2005 12:59:09 PM PDT by neverdem
IF you are reading these words, it means you are one of the millions of readers of The New York Times whose desires and dislikes are never far from the minds of the paper's editors and reporters. How they envision you and your fellow readers can have a significant effect on how well they manage to inform, serve and entertain you.
So I thought I would give you an opportunity to assess - if only in some rough sense - the news staff's perception of you, its readers, and what you want and need from the newspaper. Through e-mail, I asked about 50 news staffers, ranging from the executive editor to reporters, to describe the audience for whom they are editing and writing. More than half responded.
Who are you? The staff's descriptions ascribed characteristics to you and your fellow readers that were nearly all positive and praiseworthy - even boastful, in some cases.
Before those nice words, however, here's a statistical picture of The Times's audience. The Sunday edition has 1.7 million paying subscribers, and the copies passed along to others make the total readership of the print edition much higher. The adult readership of the Sunday paper is 5.3 million, according to Mediamark Research Inc., an audience research company. (Today's column does not deal with the online edition's audience, a topic worthy of a separate discussion at some point.)
Readers of the paper are a fairly upscale group. They are nearly three times as likely as the average U.S. adult to have a college or postgraduate degree and more than twice as likely to hold a professional or managerial position, an analysis by Mediamark Research shows...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Oddly enough, I fit into the times demographic (although I haven't reached my mid-40s yet). No desire to read that fish wrapper, however.
Gee, I didn't think liberals were rich.
"millions of readers"? I think not.
So each and every published issue is read by more than three adults on average? I know these sorts of statistics are used for comparison purposes across publications, but from a commonsense perspective it's ludicrous.
Leading offensive characteristic of and about the New York Times is the NYT' incessant self promotion and discussions, articles, issues about the NYT, it's perceptions, distrubutions, irregularities, dishonesties, whatever.
The world does not revolve around the NYT but you'd never know it by these ongoing ruminations by the NYT about itself, in whatever capacity possible. They just as soon should attach a sparkling blue glowing light to their front page because more and more, the entire lot of the place looks like the grab aisle in the discount store nearest you.
Check the red/blue map. Republican everywhere except the inner cities and the tony suburbs.
Arrogant and elitist even on this.
Bill Keller: "People pay us for our judgment,. . ."
No, they don't, you dumbsh*t. They pay you to gather and report the FACTS - remember those? - just the FACTS, not your ideological interpretation and spin. I also like the part where it says they have 1.2 million readers and MORE because the paper is passed on to others. HAHAHA! If it came to my house, it would pass straight into the recycle bin. Maybe that's "another user" to the NYT.
Kewl. Any company that thinks this way - that they should not be responsive to the desires of their customers - is augering into the ground and doesn't even realize it.
Astonishing ignorance parades about in that paper like a proud peacock. Their entire worldview is pathetically skewed, distorted, and flat-out ill-informed.
If you could teach a mule a relatively robust vocabulary, you'd only have to hit it in the head with a 2x4 a few times to bring it up to the intellectual level of a Frank Rich or Maureen Dowd.
Yyyyyyeeech! Patronizing, self-congratulatory, and delusional.
Mr. Geddes wrote, "Curious, engaged and unpredictable are the characteristics of the reader I think we edit for."
Maybe if you applied some of these traits to writing news stories your circulation decline might turn around. You aren't curious at all. Everything is bash Bush and Conservative Republicans. Most Times readers are far from engaged. They may know what is happening in the world but will refuse to read anything that is opposed to their narrow worldview. And EVERY story is totally predictible. Bush bad, Republicans in trouble according to an unnamed source. Its an old joke but if the New York Times had the story that the world was about to end in advance the headline would be: World to End: Poor and minorities hit hardest.
I like th Sunday Times....I can start a week's worth of fires with it.
I could care less about what the NYT thinks of me!
It does seem counter intuitive that an upscale creme-de-la-creme hoity toity audience would be reading hand-me down newspapers, doesn't it?
I used to subscribe to the NY Times. Then I realized that the Times is a mouthpiece for the DNC and I might as well write out a check to the DNC.
So in essence what they are saying is that it's a newspaper for liberals by liberals. Which is precisely the problem. Duh.
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