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Goodbye Old Friend

When the Times' story about John McCain's integrity hit the street today, ironically I learned about it from Google when they swiped the story from the NY Times and published it at the top of Google's news feed. That suddenly made me realize why, after nearly forty years, I've almost completely given up reading the once great New York Times. There are four reasons:

  1. First, the NYT vertical content (i.e. Business, Science, Technology) is second rate. It's not competitive with other more specialized, up to date and faster paced Internet sources of business, technology and science news. Ok, I could live with that if the other things I liked were good enough.
  2. I don't subscirbe to the paper edition of the NYT because I don't want to cut down trees, and I don't have time to read it everyday anyway. I live online now and I need and want something that's well organized, easy to navigate when I need to know something, and takes good advantage of today's technologies like RSS, social networking, etc. The NYT website is very disorganized, navigating it is a nightmare, and they can't get out of their traditionalist rut to embrace new technologies. Ok, I could live with that if the other stuff was good enough.
  3. So what about the tradition of brilliant, informed debate on the editorial pages of the New York Times. There is no debate anymore. It's one continuous liberal diatirbe, and it's not even interesting, just monotinuous whinning from near-lunatics like Krugman.
  4. So, finally there is the reporting. The notion of a "really good job of thorough, in-depth, investigative reporting that a big newspaper can do that little papers and TV and Radio sound-bite journalism can't afford to do." Frankly, my dear, I don't trust you anymore.

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