The sport that banned midgets because they were too good, employed monstrous psychopaths and psychopathic monsters, and is allegedly more harmful to life expectancy than football has finally crossed a line of dignity that the Gray Lady cannot countenance.
Sometimes interesting and usually informative, the Gray Lady's vast resources (relative to others in 2013) make its website an unique destination for THE NEWS, as Chris Morris mockingly (but accurately) called it.
By breaking stories with unbeatable inside sources and access, paying people to travel to distant happenings in faraway places, and smothering readers in thousands of words a day, the New York Times is the last newspaper in America that can do justice to world-changing events when they happen. But below the fold, and not always outside the ostensible straight news, the rest of the paper is evidence of how outdated the narrative-neutral newspaper model is, and not just financially.
There is a subtle comedy playing out in the pages of the New York Times, as the leftward bent of the paper's editors and journalists shapes their idea of impartiality, and the paper's choice of subjects to cover, but not the unbearably self-righteous, unimpeachable tone of reporting on all subjects big and small. The staff of the Times don't see themselves as left-leaning because they're biased -- they, like their 3rd person omniscient writing style, are merely informed. Do you wish to be thus informed? Then read thus and be thus bathed of your ignorance, thus! THUS.
In 2013, a paywall newspaper is competing with many, many more personality-infused websites better suited for short attention spans and clickthroughs. The stories on the frontpage are invariably placed there with a web-based audience in mind. This is smart. The problem is that those articles are -- web exclusive features excluded -- conceived and written for the newspaper. As it happens, NYTimes.com is a first-rate news source in a global crisis, but an inelegent social observor. How else do you explain a plaintive note on the ceremonial first pitch's loss of innocence, due to the evils of market forces?
In 2013, a paywall newspaper is competing with many, many more personality-infused websites better suited for short attention spans and clickthroughs. The stories on the frontpage are invariably placed there with a web-based audience in mind. This is smart. The problem is that those articles are -- web exclusive features excluded -- conceived and written for the newspaper. As it happens, NYTimes.com is a first-rate news source in a global crisis, but an inelegent social observor. How else do you explain a plaintive note on the ceremonial first pitch's loss of innocence, due to the evils of market forces?
The unerring VOICE OF GOD would like to INFORM you CITIZEN. Can you spare five minutes to hear about what the CAPITALISTS did to BASEBALL?
On bad days, the New York Times is the tell-all memoir of someone with nothing at all to tell.
