Playing to the Pageview. With (few) apologies to Cintra Wilson
The Awl pointed me to a scathing take-down by Cintra Wilson in The New York Times about JC Penney in New York.In the comments section, I added an update:
Playing to the Pageview
with (few) apologies to Cintra Wilson
The New York Times has broken free of its addiction to pulp-based distribution methods to invade the rest of the world’s internet, and the most frequent question on the literate world’s collective lips seems to be: Why?
Why would this perennially respected newspaper bother to reanimate itself across America — the dumbest, most knee-jerk population in any first world nation — during a hair-raising economic downturn, without taking the opportunity to vigorously rebrand itself? Why would this pompous Elite upper-crust entity waddle into America in its banker’s collars and Columbia MAs without even bothering to update its entrenched spite for this very population?
The New York Times has always trafficked in journalism that isn’t quite up to The Economist standards. It was never “all the news that’s fit to print” so much as “all the news that our connections deep within the American Kleptocracy have deemed fit to print and some that isn’t because it’s been made up by overly-ambitious reports more interested in personal fame than true journalism.”
But things, perhaps, have changed.
The editorial sections of the New York Times seem to be trying, in a somewhat timid fashion, to thump with new energy. Mini-sections flirt with pageview-attracting stunt features - like getting meaningless slideshows on boobs or German directors or Irish band frontmen to babble incoherently about their world views- not quite Op Ed, but nearly an opinion. It is possible for a reader to navigate away feeling mildly reinforced in an already-held opinion. Middle age liberals were quite delighted, gasping and squealing to find their worldviews memorialized by actual Nobel-winning columnists with pieces like “Health Care Realities” and “Republican Death Trip.”
A cheerful editorial intern, Ima GonnabeaBlogger, assured me: “I really genuinely like working here. We are one big, happy, tight-knit family in editorial.”
When I asked what she liked best about The New York Times, Ms. GonnabeaBlogger replied, “The knowledge, the diversity, the layout,” with a talking-point accuracy that I suspected came to her via instructional videotape.
“There’s a lot of ways to advance within the company,” she continued, with genuine enthusiasm. “I am learning to do all sorts of things.” Ms. GonnabeaBlogger hopes that working at the Times will move her closer to her goal of a career in journalism, and her positive upward mobility struck me (and I say this with no sarcasm) as being a good thing on dozens of levels.
Since the 1900s, The New York Times, like a journalistic Island of Dr. Moreau, has been doing a sinister experiment with various writers, turning them into something … not quite human. The plot is a journalism democratization known as “bullshit,” which sounds proctological, but is a marketing term created by a fusion of “bull” and “shit.” It refers to a downward brand extension: writers compelled to put their good names on down-market lines of “affordable content.” (Read: items of cheaper materials, sold online to lower priced advertising.)
A good 96 percent of the New York Times inventory is made of press releases and insider connections. The few column items that are made of real research make a sincere point of being so and tell you earnestly about their 100-percent not a press-release with faux-hand-scribbled titles so obviously desperate to be taken seriously they practically spilt ink.
It took me a long time to find a something worth reading among the sections. There are, however, abundant style, opinion and boomer-centric love columns about divorce. The pages are big, clean and well tended. I tried two fairly intelligent items: a modified “Death Panels” thing by Jim Ruthenberg and a Michael Vick piece by Judy Battista. Each was around 400 words; each fit nicely and read good. I didn’t buy either because I can just read the summary on some blog.
AND herein lies the genius of the New York Times: It has made a point of providing content for people of one mindset (a strategy, company officials have said, to preserve the business from blogs and online papers). To this end, it has some of the most pathetic page-view baiting strategies I have ever seen. The editors probably need special heroin-based injections just to help them sleep at night.
This online environment has been almost wholly neglected on our snobby, self-obsessed little industry. Big newspapers tend to cater to the old, hopelessly out of touch, diabetic-tortured Palm Beach divorcee. But there are many more readers who vote with their hard-earned dollars, who appreciate a clean new idea in journalism. Since The Times remains so doggedly unchanged, it seems to be a familiar place for the nostalgic; they feel comfortable buying a New York Times, and the paper still feels special sitting on the coffee table for guests to see, because it’s the New York Times.
And that will probably make some poor bastard feel pretty good about himself.