Memo to the New York Times: Matt Drudge has better new sense than your elitist brain trust. That’s Reason #1 why he’s successful. He also doesn’t need an entire floor of a building dedicated to figuring out how how the Internet works.
The DrudgeReport is successful because Drudge’s understanding of the newscycle led to his website replacing the Times as the first click of the day for a critical mass of reporters, editors, talk radio hosts, citizen journalists, producers, activists and everyday Americans who are tired of being force-fed what a handful of Big Apple, big-government loving, self-appointed pseudo-opinion makers think is important.
I still read the Times. Occasionally. Ross Douthat was a good hire. And I like the weekend sections.
Also, how’s that paywall working?
Tough to compete in this century with only last century’s skills/mindset.
Although your first sentence with the phrase ‘new sense’ is probably true, it is also probably a typo.
I think Owen meant “news sense,” and that’s a critical insight: The NYT constantly violates the basic rules of journalism (i.e., dog bites man is NOT news, man bites dog IS news) in service of its obsessive need to reinforce the progressive worldview in every way every minute of every day. The result is a product that’s “progressively” less relevant to the rest of us. Huge case in point: In early 2001 the Times led a prestigious journalistic fishing expedition to Florida with the express intent to uncover massive vote fraud that would prove Bush had usurped the presidency with the help of the Supreme Court (i.e., the lefty narrative). Instead, the big investigation actually found Bush had won Florida by 537 votes. In other words, his election as president was perfectly legitimate. This was huge “news” by the Times’ own standards, since the Times fully expected to find the opposite. It ran the article on Page One, all right, but the main news — that Bush had won by 537 votes — was buried in paragraph 10 or 12 after great gobs of foolish equivocating. As a former copy editor at that level of daily journalism, I found myself deeply embarrassed. In fact, editors should have been fired over such a lapse, but Times management didn’t consider it a bug but a feature of Times coverage. Since then, the attention I pay to the Times has tended toward the vanishing point.
And yet The Times’ crew often ignores stories trumpeted by Drudge until they’re forced to cover them and eat crow. So … do they really visit Drudge and ignore what they see? Or do they simply think it’s not wise to spend 20 seconds a day perusing headlines the entire country is devouring?