The Washington Post and the New York Times
February 14, 2012
It seems like the New York Times is losing its journalistic perspectives at the same time that the Washington Post is disappearing in front of our eyes as a newspaper.
Last week the WPost announced another series of dramatic cutbacks. Clearly the business was hemorrhaging so badly that these further rounds of cut backs became necessary. The Post is already a shell of its former self. One of America’s finest papers may be strictly on-line before it covers the next presidential election. Meanwhile the Times—no doubt with glee—played the story as a business matter (rather than a journalism-information issue) in a spread in Sunday’s business section, perpetuating the long standing rivalry between the Post and the Grey Lady.
At the same time this same bastion of journalistic excellence and high standards appears to now seeking to attract tabloid readers by playing the Kate Upton genesis into the SI swimsuit cover as a front page news story and not an arts or business story.
Surely the Times is now opening itself up once again to critics from all ideological positions as to how and who is making news judgments on the serious issues of the day. Maybe it is becoming “All the News that Sells We Print”.
Comments
Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief
February 15, 2012
In defense of the Upton story, it was really about the fashion industry, not a People magazine profile. With fashion week in town—a gigantic cultural event for New York but also a significant financial story considering the industry’s presence and impact in the city—it made sense to have a fashion story on page one. The Times has a bureau’s worth of reporters, including Guy Trebay, who cover the fashion industry fulltime. This story focused on how new media and social networking are changing the career path for many models. That it offered a little cheesecake (and, by the way, the front page photo, below the fold, was quite demure) was an added bonus.
Youc ould argue, I suppose, that the “business” angle is just an excuse for spicing up page one. To which I ask—and why not? To offer a little break from the grim news above the fold—is that such a bad thing? It is not as if the day’s paper did not offer a rich and varied diet of serious news—Iran, Greece, Syria, the presidential campaign, etc.
And honestly—a newspaper is a product, not a public service. There is huge competition to attract readers, and especially eyeballs to the web. I can’t balme the Times from trying to pull in readers in a hyper-competitive market.