TIMES RUNNIN’ OUT!

Oh, The New York Times is in big trouble. BIG SURPRISE!!! I’ve been complaining about that newspaper for years. A city like New York should be able to do better.


They think they are an Establishment, but all they are is just another boring newspaper. I have practically quit reading it, and even though I try to avoid taking it seriously, I am still mortally offended by its middlebrow conformism.


Not that The Times does not sometimes feature superb writers, but the regular staff is from hunger! If I have to sit through another plodding, moralistic opinion piece by a neurotic dork whose whole qualification in life is that he graduated from Podunk College forty years ago, and has never done shit since then but write boring little opinion pieces, then I am going to go up with that guy at the Empire State Building and jump off with him.


Now it turns out that The Times is leaking money like a sieve and facing a shareholders revolt. BIG SURPRISE! That place is like a Rodney Dangerfield movie, minus the laughs. The publisher of The Times, “Pinch” Sulzberger, who inherited the job because his family owns all the voting stock, looks from his pictures like he could not be trusted to feed the canaries in a pet shop. He has mismanaged a multi-billion dollar publishing empire to the nth degree. Under his management The Times completely misrepresented the Iraq war and generated the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals. The editor who had to resign over the Jayson Blair scandal, Howell Raines, is having his new book serialized in, get this, Field and Stream Magazine!! Talk about not knowing shit about New York….!


And that’s an apt metaphor: The Times doesn’t know if it’s fish or fowl. Who’s going to read an article about hip-hop music written by a Princeton graduate? Just because you know Strunk’s Elements of Style does not make you a writer.


“Pinch” Sulzberger’s strategy for The Times seems to be based on a business model Where No Man Has Gone Before, change a New York newspaper into a national newspaper. Obviously, to succeed would necessitate softening its urban impact to appeal to readers living in more sedate environments. This is already happening, with tedious features about baby carriages, and the joys of living in Park Slope.


The cloying, vacant cultural coverage, which used to be targeted at tired middle-aged readers, now seems to target tired youngish readers. It is a paper without a point of view, covering insignificant social tendencies with an airhead, pollyannaish, smilyface naiveté totally uninformed by anything resembling culture. It’s the lowest common denominator for the middle range.


The paper needs to be shaken out of its lethargy from the top, with a complete change of leadership. It’s current editorial line-up is a dog. It needs to take a jazzier approach to local news, where The Post and The Daily News are eating its lunch.


Who cares if The New York Times lives or dies? Not me. There’s plenty of places to go for news and opinion. Hell, I’ll just write it myself!

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Posted on 4/30/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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