By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Checking through a recent credit card invoice, I noticed the item that renewed my New York Times subscription. The thought that followed was depressing. Very soon that disbursal will not be recurrent.
Kicking a habit isn’t easy, and I feel bad about the pending decision, but I’m verging on the enough-is-enough stage. More to the point, I’ve all but decided that this boluxed up, anorexic version of the NYT isn’t worth paying so much for.
First, the dimensions of my favorite newspaper were shrunk, which wasn’t entirely awful. An old fashioned broad sheet is hard to read on an airplane when you’re flying economy class (alas). However, the decrease in column inches per page was not accompanied by an increase in the number of pages. Result: I was getting less for my money.
The once weighty daily is getting lighter in other ways, too. When I scoop it up from the driveway, its shrinkage in ounces symbolizes a loss of breadth and depth, even as lifestyle sections proliferate. There’s no denying that the print press has lost its old monopoly on breaking news, but trustworthy backgrounders and solid analysis are still in short supply on the alternative media.
And speaking of style, the emergent way of handling the news all too often results in personality-driven stories written like human interest fluff pieces: heavy on anecdote, light on facts, numbers, logic. News lite. Too many words for too little substance. Time consuming to read, but unnourishing. I don’t need this.
The next eye-jolting change was more recent: the hypertrophy of the table of contents beginning with page two. Typically, now, I confront three pages of widely spaced material masquerading as a kind of news summary that's supposedly (or so the hype went) a big benefit to me, the busy reader. It isn’t. If I wanted news-by-the-bite, I wouldn’t subscribe to the daily and Sunday NYT. Moreover, I can’t help noticing that these pages carry the max of advertising, 50% or more of available inches, and most days this space-padding new feature is followed by a full page ad. That’s four pages to skip over before I get to the pith of the paper.
This intro stuff must be cheap to produce. It doesn’t take a hotshot reporter to write a one sentence summary. Think of the income, the profits, from these ad-heavy pages alone! Meanwhile, the paper keeps adding glitzy, ad-heavy life style sections and supplements: styles, home, travel, fashion, etc.
So do the math. If you add specialized new sections, you need writers/reporters and editors to make them possible. Yet, if you don’t also add personnel, you have to draw from existing editorial departments. And if, on top of such cannibalizing, you’ve been cutting editorial and reportorial staff, what happens to the pool of people devoted to hard news and analysis? It shrinks. No wonder stories with core importance are now wildly inflated to provide extra pages for advertising without incurring the costs that more stories, more tightly edited would entail.
I confess that I glance at these life style sections. I may even notice, in passing, the ads. However, if I wanted to pore over life style publications, I’d buy the real deal. And the more these sections characterize an increasingly weightless NYT, the less I need the NYT.
The latest format change doesn’t even make financial sense, so far as I can see, but it is truly irritating. The old news and business sections, the parts I really want to read, are being chopped up in ways I certainly can’t make sense of. Divorcing sports from business makes sense, but what’s the rationale for sub-dividing the news section into two or three separate sections and making stories jump from one segment to another? Super sectioning doesn’t facilitate the ritual of sharing the paper over the breakfast table either. It was annoying enough to manage a cross-table swap of news and business sections, but consider the far more irritating wait to finish a story while the partner clings to the mini-section where the continuation’s sited. And even if you don’t have to share the paper, seesawing from section to section is no fun.
Furthermore, why this mindless multiplication of sections when the total number of pages is shrinking? To confuse us long suffering news junkies into thinking we’re getting more when we’re really getting less? How dumb do the NYT business people think we are?
Better to read the news on the net, I’m thinking.
I’ve resisted this move for lo! these many months only for two reasons.
The first is partly sybaritic, partly mere habit. Sitting outdoors, sipping coffee and riffling through a real paper seems nicer by far than hunching over a keyboard where I already spend too much of my day.
The second is more serious. When the rest of the national print press goes the way of the Christian Science Monitor, which has recently discontinued its daily paper edition, who is going to pay for what remains of investigative journalism? WhirledView, I believe, more than holds its own on analysis. Sometimes we even manage to get our hands on a real scoop—and our readership numbers soar! But for the most part we are necessarily parasitic on solid reporting by MSM journalists, who earn good salaries from their employers. WV can’t afford to fund a foreign correspondent. We can’t afford to send anyone to Washington or anywhere else to root out inconvenient truths.
Believe it or not, I clung to my long standing subscription to the NYT in order to do my bit in the way of supporting an essential function in a democratic society. If citizens are to make good political decisions, they need timely accurate complete information. Rooting it out is an expensive proposition, and I've been happy to contribute my mite.
But newspaper owners, I believe, have sold us out. Instead of accepting the entirely decent profits that were possible, even with generously staffed newsrooms and competing foreign correspondents, newspaper owners began to get greedy. They bought into the Wall Street profit expectations that gave us our just busted financial bubble. To meet such inflated expectations, newsrooms have had to be gutted, and the end of this suicidal process is not in sight.
The irony is that such cheapening is self-defeating. What’s the predictable result of recasting journalism as ordinary business? A product of diminishing intellectual value. Papers full of PR material masquerading as genuine news stories. I cite the most pernicious and egregious (but hardly unique) example: the Iraq war was sold to the American people by a willfully blind and/or credulous press as much as by a duplicitous government. No wonder the NYT and other national dailies are losing readership. Those who need or simply enjoy a serious newspaper don't want the increasingly watered down contemporary versions.
And so, old friend, the moment is nigh. I’m not a hopeless addict. In a couple of months, my current subscription will run out, and my NYT injection will be reduced to Sundays only—and that mostly because I have one vice I’m not quite ready to shake. Those Sunday crossword puzzles. Which raises an interesting question: how many trees is a crossword worth?