HOWLING RAINES

The long-anticipated Atlantic Monthly piece on the The New York Times is out. This epic (pages 49-81) by former Times managing editor Howell Raines is really interesting. He grasps the essential problem of the Times, which is that it is failing to reach its potential audience (they figure maybe 40 mm, vs. circulation of about 1 mm).

There are many reasons for this.

In the financial world, the problem is that The Wall Street Journal has first-read status sewn up, and publications like The Economist and Financial Times have really turned up the heat in the battle for second.

As a local paper, he says, the Times has not written about things many New Yorkers care about. Take the the death of the R&B singer Aaliyah: "...one of our music critics had declared her a minor musician. So what? She was an icon of minority communities."

But he seems most hurt by the Times's failings in middlebrow culture. "When Entertainment Weekly magazine publishes, as it did in 2001, a more learned article on Tolkien's influence on directors of mythic films than can be found in our Sunday Arts & Leisure section, that shouts out the fact that the Times is back on its heels."

In its day, you could pick up the Times and get almost as much as if you'd read four or five more specialized publications. Not really true today. Here is the current list of stuff I look at:

Involuntary
Financial: Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Forbes
International News: BBC Online
Voluntary
Deep Thoughts: New York Review of Books
U.S. Politics: Washington Post, but to be honest these days I mostly just look at the polls.

If I had to add something it would be Financial Times, not the New York Times. Not just to beat up on the Times here, but who reads Time, Newsweek, or U.S. News and World Report anymore? Why bother?

It's a shame because there's less competition for serious journalism today than at any time since at least WW2. We could use a courageous, independent, high-quality newspaper in America right now.

Gotta run, Sean Hannity's on TV.

[I cannot find an equivalent for the NYT as the American paper of record. The Washington Post, which I also find myself reading more and more for its political coverage, is a comparative non-entity on it's cultural coverage - which is for my reading where the Times excels. And because I believe that the politics and the economy tends to follow culture rather than the reverse - a position of faith if ever there was one - that missing element sinks most other publications.

Here's why I still read it, and its strength is its weakness: The Grey Lady is an immovable object, one of the few American institutions that can intelligently resist the relentless onslaught of the media emissions of interested parties, and can still incorporate disinterested American social and political thought into its reporting. The WSJ's psychotorials, the Post's Capitol-ism, the LA Times's particular media environment, show no promise of replacing the NYT, so there I still am.

The best hope in terms of a comprehensive mission may be NPR, which in its growth, cultural connectivity and ubiquity may be replacing the NYT more than competing publications. But despite its initimacy and immediacy, radio by nature can only present limited information and context.

I've talked to a lot of people who with Google News find themselves gravitating to the Guardian and the Independent. A thought: they seem to have the best combination of thoughtful and informative lead sentences.

P.S. on CNN now:

Wolf Blitzer: Why do you always want (each existing) president to be re-elected?
Saudi Ambassador: Why wouldn't I?

(awkward pause) -PWP]