Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

White House wants to hear from you about Obamacare (if you agree with them)

I subscribe to e-mails from The White House (like the one below) to keep track of what they are actually saying. Normally their e-mails are recitations of the President's talking points and don't add anything meaningful. However, this time David Simas was soliciting input to prove their case that the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") is actually working. So, since I involuntarily have new health coverage as of January 1 (that's what The White House was asking for) I decided to submit my own "story." Here's what I submitted: I am retired. I pay for Medicare but I don't rely on it for quality health care. I have new coverage as of January 1st which I was forced to purchase privately as an individual. I believe I was driven to this largely by one of the unintended consequences of Obamacare which is that large employers will now more easily drop retiree group medical plans (to pay for other costs of Obamacare) citing Obamacare as the backstop for t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson My rating: 5 of 5 stars Having read only snippets and never a complete biography of Leonardo da Vinci before, I have no basis of comparison from which to judge the accuracy of Isaacson's beautifully written account of Leonardo's life. Assuming it's accurate, Isaacson's account leaves no doubt that; the man was a true genius, he led a fascinating life much of which was enabled by being born near the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe and he was fortunate to have been associated with so many other brilliant characters. The only minor issue I had with the book was not always being able to tell exactly what the current scholarly research consensus is about the many mysteries of Leonardo's life versus Isaacson's opinion. The book is well worth reading. View all my reviews
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Prophet

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews
Post a Comment
Read more