What’s the idea with The New York Times?
I posted yesterday about our culture being so ADD. Americans, especially kids, multitask their media and therefore have a hard time concentrating. Tweet tweet. You’ve got mail. Beep beep beep. Ring ring. Long form, analytical media is hurting (read magazines) so we are shorten it. DVRs allow us to put our TV on hold. We buy single songs. The world is not only flat, it’s freakin’ frenetic.
I can live with most of it — it’s just culture — but there’s one example that really bothers me. It’s pages 2 and 3 of the New York Times newspaper. Sacred pages once, they are today filled with 50-word digests of the paper’s stories. Designed to take best advantage of the reduced amount of time readers are willing to spend with the paper, these pages are nothing more than a geezer search engine. The founders are flipping in their terra.
For me these two pages demonstrate a defeatist mentality on the part of The Times. Where’s the serendipity in the exploration of the paper? The voyage? It is not that I’m a traditionalist, but seriously, when did the NY Times turn into a better-written USA Today?
