Newspapers are running scared -- we Xers just aren’t getting our news from print anymore, we don’t need the classifieds thanks to Craigslist... we’re just not cooperating in the great game newspapers have been playing of delivering eyeballs to advertisers.
The solution?
On July 6, [New York] Times managing editor Jill Abramson and associate managing editor Rick Berke convened a lunchtime gathering of the paper’s youngest writers -- including health-system-exposé scribe Michael Luo and social-trend-piece innovator Jennifer 8. Lee -- to urge them to put their stamp on the paper.
The morning that Judith Miller was heading to jail in the name of civil disobedience, Ms. Abramson was telling The Times’ youth corps to practice a little disobedience of its own. Her message, said a staffer who attended, was: "Don’t roll over to your editors. We’re the future of the paper."
"Not to start World War III with editors," Ms. Abramson said on the phone this week, "but I wanted to consciously send them a message that we want the paper to be full of engaging writing and engaging voices."
So, at a buffet luncheon of sushi, tandoori chicken and curried cauliflower in the paper’s 11th-floor dining room, Ms. Abramson admonished the junior set to resist the paper’s "stentorian voice."
"Jill encouraged us to be rebellious in our writing," the staffer said. "She told us we should fight back. If we want to do something risqué that editors clean up, we should push back."
The designated Wild Ones consisted of 16 staffers under the age of 30. Besides Mr. Luo and Ms. Lee, the group included business writers Andrew Ross Sorkin and Eric Dash, metro reporters Sewell Chan and Nicholas Confessore, arts reporter Lola Ogunnaike and Boldface Names scribe—and occasional cartoonist—Campbell Robertson.
Ms. Abramson said the meeting with the young Timespersons was part of a larger effort to get sharper prose into the pages. "It’s a feeling in general that I have," she said. "I’m talking about writing with style and some edge, and constantly looking for the most interesting way to frame stories."
[from The New York Observer]
The upshot, so far, appears to be an uptick in the snide condescension dripping from the Times toward things geeky. In today’s paper alone, we have Sarah Boxer, who pens lots and lots of vapid stuff about the Web for the paper, breaking the news that "Cats are the Web's it-animals. They're everywhere," and then offering some in-depth analysis for this striking cultural phenomenon:
Why cats and not dogs?
Cats are O.K. living in tight places and never going out. They don't mind if their owners spend every waking hour on the Internet.
Dogs would die if they had to wait for their owners to go off line. And who wants to post pictures of a dead animal? Serious bloggers, the kind who float to the top of Google regularly, just don't have time or space for dogs.
But can that be the whole story? There's a deeper answer to be had at infinitecat.com, where users post pictures of their cats gazing at pictures of other cats already posted on the Infinite Cat site. You see an infinite regress: pictures of cats looking at pictures of cats looking at pictures of cats.
Remind you of anything? Those cats are like so many bloggers sitting at home staring into their computer screens and watching other bloggers blog other bloggers. Cats, who live indoors and love to prowl, are the soul of the blogosphere. Dogs would never blog.
[from The New York Times]
Yup, that’s the way to attract the online intelligentsia: insult them.
Or then there’s Kaavya Viswanathan, whom we’re told is "a sophomore at Harvard," and her revelatory op-ed that exposes an obscure literary endeavor from Britain:
It wasn't until "Chamber of Secrets" hit best-seller lists, the summer before I began eighth grade, that my dad brought the first two books home and persuaded me to read them.
Even though I'm now in college, and buried in a reading list that's more Proust than Potter, I made sure I got my copy of the "Half-Blood Prince" on July 16 and seriously considered taking a day off from my job to read.
[from The New York Times]
Yeah, so even though Harry Potter isn’t, like, Proust or anything, even Harvard sophomores are deigning to read it!
It feels to me that, increasingly, the Times is being written by alien visitors for their readers back on Planet Xigyjkqz, who may find themselves intrigued by this Internet thing that, oh, much of the population under 40 considers an integral part of their lives. How the paper expects to woo us back when it appears determined not to understand us is a hilarious mystery to me.
But perhaps if I change my name to MaryAnn 7 Johanson and start writing the most banal crap I can come up with about "the Web" -- hey, check out that Google, will ya?! -- I, too, will be feted with tandoori chicken and hailed as the savior of a dying institution.
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