You know, I don’t think I’ve read a single Thomas Friedman column since the NYT’s TimeSelect put it behind the paywall. I suspect that has led me to lead a healthier lifestyle, stopped my hairline from receding and increased my productivity by about 20%. Reading this Fisking of recent Friedman prose on the excellent Tabsir reminded me what I’m not missing. Over the recent weeks as I’ve practically given up on reading any of the New York Times because of how bad and biased their coverage of the war on Lebanon has been. (Just read the Angry Arab, who has been following it. I worry about his health.) My girlfriend just changed her homepage setting from the Times to the Post. I think now I will unsubscribe from their email alerts, and avoid reading it altogether. Apart from David Pogue’s technology column, anyway. That’s it: I will just think of NYT as a decent lifestyle publication, just ignore the news.
P.S. I heard they will be publishing a translation Bernard Henry-Levy’s moronic article in Le Monde this weekend. Classic: they publish him when he’s being saccharine about Israel even though they trashed him with glee for his book American Vertigo.
Ha! I changed my homepage from NYT to BBC in the last few months too, after reading it religiously every morning for ten years. NYT seems to have pretty much given up on its international section, in favour of American social and political coverage. It’s either flimsy cutesy human interest stuff or their particular slant on something everyone else is reporting.
These new Amazon ads are good – there are books on Israel-Palestine and then a very sultry Haifa CD cover.
Gave up on NY Times a while back, too. Was living in NY during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq and was so annoyed by the coverage and the hawkish stance of some of their reporters and columnists, I cancelled my subscription. I took out my anger with the paper on one of the poor guys who answers their phones, though!
As well the NYT’s transformation into a lifestyle rag, the NYT’s owners have also overseen the decline of the International Herald Tribune from a great international newspaper into the useful for cat litter category. Only William Pfaff and Souren Melikian are worth reading at the IHT these days.
Let’s be fair though, it’s not just the NYT: on a recent trip to England I found that the entire UK broadsheet press, with the exception of the Guardian and the Financial Times, has gone the same way.
The irony about the Guardian is that it was the first to go Lifestle with the appearance of G2 and its odes to Nigella Lawson, but has actually managed to keep the lifestyle in G2. The FT has certainly gotten more lifestyle, especially in their once excellent weekend edition, but is still fine on weekdays.
You’re right that the loss of the IHT is sad. I have a recurring fantasy of buying it up and restoring its domestic US original, the Herald Tribune, to compete directly with the NYT and WaPo. Imagine what you could do if you made it partly staff written and partly carrying articles by the often excellent smaller services like KnightRidder or Newsday.
PH, you weren’t the only one. A lot of people I know called and angrily cancelled their subscriptions in 2003-2004. Doesn’t seem to have made a difference. Makes you wonder, has the NYT target audience shifted to the Right, or do they just get by on people who subscribe out of the force of habit.
I was an onlooker at a conference a few years ago about how online news and blogging were going to change the print media in the US, and one of the sentiments expressed by journalists was that newspapers were going to have to become more niche, more focused on analysis and opinion and features and quirky stories and less just-the-facts, if they wanted to keep their audience. So it’s partly your fault, you bloggers.