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The New York Times
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gallery
"Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840 - 1940"
“'Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940,' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, manages to operate in the gap between both kinds of miracles, innovative and talismanic. It presents the history of a medium as well as history itself. This exhibition appropriates a model usually reserved for painters, old or modern masters. Organized by Malcolm Daniels, the curator in charge of the Met’s photography department, “Framing a Century” recounts the medium’s 100 years with a succinct cavalcade of big names, substantial bodies of work and significant historical impact." More »
print is dead
'NYT' Leaving the Suburbs
In yet another move that will likely piss-off Old Tyme-y newspaper types, The New York Times is shutting down a whole batch of its suburban outposts. One staffer writes in, "Big stuff. They are closing all of their suburban bureaus, packing up, giving up, going home to protect what is left of their base—seven 84 year-olds on the upper west side. White Plains, New Jersey, Connecticut and Long Island—shuttered, reporters brought into Manhattan and reassigned, pretty much except for one dude in New Jersey, kept there so that tri-state doesn't have less correspondents than, say, Montana. If that's not a metaphor for their dire economic circumstances, I'm not sure what is—but it's a curious decision too. Their shrinking readership base in the city is smaller than the ring outside it. Maybe they want it to be bigger again…by shrinking what's outside of it. Ah, now I get it." But another source inside the Gray Lady has a less dire take. More »
Adorbs!
Awww 'NYT' Headline Writers Think They Work Here
What does it say about a story when an editor at The New York Times resorts to snark? Is this part of that whole Times loosening up thing? Is it a way to soften the blow of a really wordy article on a topic that no one seems to know anything about? Take this, for instance. More »
Adventures in Journalism
Times Journo's Prison Weekend
The New York Times' Barry Bearak reports on his four-day stint in a Zimbabwe prison on charges of "committing journalism." It began when 21 policemen and detectives raided the lodge where he'd been staying. "The crowded room was hot. Already, I felt jailed. I needed a breath of air, but when I moved toward the door, Detective Jasper Musademba, a well-built man in a jacket and tie, stopped me. He had been the most threatening of the police. 'If you try to go outside...' he said sternly, stopping in midsentence. He made his hand into a gun and pulled the trigger. 'You’ll kill me?' I asked. 'Good,' he remarked wryly. 'Then you’ve seen that movie.'” More »
junior high
'NYT' Bullied Boy Bullied a Boy
Turns out the subject of that New York Times article about the Arkansas kid who gets beat up all the time, Billy Wolfe, is himself a bit of bad news. And that Pulitzer-winning reporter Dan Barry either missed or ignored that complicating little twist. A story in the Northwest Arkansas Times details a police report on young Wolfe: "[T]he police report contains allegations that Billy harassed a student confined to a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy by sneaking up behind him and screaming to aggravate the disabled boy’s sensitivity to noise, by bouncing a rubber ball against the disabled boy’s head, and by calling him 'stupid' and a 'retard.' The police report provides further context on the assaults described in the NYT." More »
Trends of Doom
Blogging Will Make You Fat, Or Skinny, And KILL YOU!
In the last few months, two bloggers—ages 50 and 60—dropped dead of heart attacks. Times for a trend piece! "Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet." Whoa, sucks to be them. But who are the evil bastards that drive this infernal machine? "Some sites, like those owned by Gawker Media, give bloggers retainers and then bonuses for hitting benchmarks, like if the pages they write are viewed 100,000 times a month. Then the goal is raised, like a sales commission: write more, earn more." D'Oh! More »
and now he's dead
Charlton Heston, Actor
Well, you can have his gun now. Oscar winning actor, NRA president, and all around iconic conservative slab of beefcake, Charlton Heston, died last night at his Beverly Hills home. He was 84. "His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who declined to discuss the cause. In August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had been diagnosed with neurological symptoms 'consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.'" [NYT] Olds, and The New York Times, will remember him as the star of The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, but for the rest of us, he will always be the man who launched a thousand spoofs. Update: "Heston was born John Charles Carter in Evanston, Illinois, on Oct. 4, 1923, though the year of his birth has been in dispute for years, with some sources saying he was born in 1924." [Bloomberg] More »
the riches
Moneyed Wusses Prepare for Doomsday
“'I’m not a gun-nut, camo-wearing skinhead. I don’t even hunt or fish,' said Bill Marcom, 53, a construction executive in Dallas. Still, motivated by a belief that the credit crunch and a bursting housing bubble might spark widespread economic chaos — 'the Greater Depression,' as he put it — Mr. Marcom began to take measures to prepare for the unknown over the last few years: buying old silver coins to use as currency; buying G.P.S. units, a satellite telephone and a hydroponic kit; and building a simple cabin in a remote West Texas desert." Yes, Mr. Marcom, when the apocalypse hits, Lord Humongous will gladly accept your old sliver coins as "currency." More »
op-ed
Dowd Screams Her Point, Backtracks
Times columnist and walking self-parody Maureen Dowd insists today that "Democrats are trying to sneak up on Hillary, throw a burlap sack over her head, carry her off the field and stick her in a Saddam spider hole until after the Denver convention." Yep, the party is through with Senator Hillary Clinton. "Democrats are coming around to the point Jay Rockefeller made 10 days ago after introducing Obama in West Virginia: 'Democrats always make a mistake by nominating people who know everything on earth there is to know about public policy. I introduced both Al Gore and John Kerry at their rallies. They knew all the policies, but people didn’t connect with them. You don’t get elected president if people don’t like you.'" Plus, the ladies of The View find Barack Obama "sexy," so surely the race is over. More »
corrections
This is Not a Crack House
Last week, annoyingly one-named reporter for The New York Times, Toure, wrote about his middle class guilt and snitching to the cops about a crack house on his block. The article was illustrated with this photo of some handsome residences in Toure's neighborhood. But, oops! More »
media
Eliot Spitzer: Media Critic
Before The New York Times utterly destroyed former Governor Eliot Spitzer by breaking the news of his whoring ways, Spitzer didn't have much respect for the paper. New York State District Attorney David Soares' report on Troopergate includes an email exchange between Spitzer and aid Rich Baum in which they discuss Times reporter Nick Confessore. "In a separate set of e-mails early in the morning on that date, Spitzer asked Rich Baum: 'So how do u think confessore came out?'""To this, Baum replied: 'Thought confe[ssore] story was what you said—fine but not how should have been written. Amazing what they pass off as analysis."
"Spitzer responded: 'Agreed. Confessor[e] was just so superficial, but our side is there, and headline and lead are okay."
Nice of Spitzer to give Confessore and his Times colleagues some stronger meat to cover.
issues
Our Nation Is Gripped By A Turkey Carving Crisis!
The hard part about writing News You Can Use isn't finding the solution; it's proving there's a problem to be solved. Consider today's Times, wherein dining reporter Julia Moskin has a nice Thanksgiving Eve article (accompanied online by a thrilling instructional video) about a new low-stress, expert-approved way to carve up your turkey. But is the old hack-and-slice regime really so problematic? Yes. "Before breakfast on Thanksgiving," begins Moskin's tale, "as the first Americans rise to preheat the oven, the question of who is going to carve the bird starts to ripple anxiously across the land." This being journalism (of sorts), the burden of proof requires at least some civilian testimony, which is where things take a decided turn toward the gothic. More »
bozos in paradise
David Brooks Discovers "Dozens Of Niche Musical Genres Where There Used To Be This Thing Called Rock"
Friedman's oblivious egomania, Dowd's insouciance to basic norms of logical argument, Kristof's admirable ambulance chasing: all such other Times op-ed superpowers pale in comparison to David Brooks's truly awe-inspiring, magisterial laziness. Like a frat boy funneling a brew, he sits waiting for ideas to trickle down and, when he's had his fill, spits out a rank, frothy mess whose resemblance to last week's rank, frothy mess he takes as affirmative proof of his unfalsifiable claims about life and stuff. Today, he pretends to write about music. Why? More »
Yesterday Radar seized on a memo circulating at the Times which would abolish the use of story datelines indicating when a reporter actually wrote a story, as opposed to when the story was printed. "The "significant advantages" include doing "away with datelines that are several days old, which can make a story seem stale rather than immediate," Radar reports. Ah yes, much better to seem immediate than to actually be immediate.[Radar]
structures
'Times' Review Deems New Times Building 'Kind of Okay!'
Step aside, public editor Clark Hoyt! The Times's impulse for self-assessment takes a more material(ist) turn today with architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff's review of the new Renzo Piano-designed Times HQ on Eighth Ave. and 41st Street. Ouroussoff—as far as architecture critics go, really an unimpeachable guy who continues to fight the good fight against the Cialis-crude phallus going up as the so-called Freedom Tower—doesn't dodge the conflict of interest issues. Much. More »
Good news for books! John Grisham's "Playing For Pizza"—the story of a washed-up American quarterback whose trip to Italy to play for the Parma Panthers leads to hijinx—is no longer #1 on the Times hardcover bestseller list. Bad news for books: "Playing for Pizza" is now at #3, bumped by a new Patricia Cornwell novel with "dead" in the title and a "paranormal romance" called "A Lick [hmm!] Of Frost." More distressingly, "The Orc King"—the story of a dark elf named Drizzt Do'Urden—is all the way down to #17. Of course, the list "is not a completely accurate barometer of what the reading public is buying," so phew.
books
