Free advice for the NYT and the Boston Globe, if they wish to survive, from Jeff Jarvis. Darn interesting ideas. One quote:
As for the New York Times itself, I’d cut bait and turn it into a national newspaper — international in their dreams. The Times is not now and has not been for sometime a New York paper. So I’d either spin off or kill metro coverage. It could become a new local online collaborative journalistic network in the mold of the new Globe. Or it could die and I firmly believe a new and more nimble local network can emerge and take up the slack left. With that spinoff goes the Times production and distribution arms, in the Morgan model.
If these large newspapers can think outside the proverbial box, as Jeff suggests, they might have a fine future despite their Leftist views. Gee whiz, they're just newspapers - not God's gift to mankind. There is no shortage of interesting stuff to read - like Maggie's Farm, for one modest example.
At the NYT, some integrity and some balance wouldn't hurt, but is not their solution. Just don't dumb it down: the world does not need another USA Today targeted towards curious 3rd grade drop-outs. They need prosperous middlebrow readers like me, who look forward to the Book Review.
(NYC, by the way, has tons of newspapers, from countless neighborhood papers like Chelsea Now, The Staten Island Advance, and The Village Voice, to city-wide papers like The Daily News, The NY Post, The NY Sun, The New York Observer, and Newsday - and more. It's the ultimate newspaper town, and every suburb has at least one local rag. The complication is that the whole country is interested in what goes on in NYC and, nowadays, in our imperial state, Washington too. Alas, because I wish that what those bozos did in DC had no importance to me.)
I love newspapers, and worked on one during summers as a lad (The Hartford Courant, in the typewriter and linotype era), but now I only read online stuff (not including magazines and the local rag, which covers purely local matters and which is required for fire-starting, and for gun- and game-cleaning - and to find out which of your bonehead neighbors has been arrested for burglarizing a hardware store in Torrington).
Confession: I enjoy most of the Sunday NYT, and, between the wife and I, we pretty much give at least a glance at every page of the darn thing. It's their political spin and bias that give us migraines: "Can you believe they said this, honey?" (We cancelled the daily years ago, in a fit of disgust.)
