A Grand Illusion

There is also Part 2 and Part 3. Enjoy.

Last night on the Daily Show, Jason Jones posed a question to New York Times’ Assistant Managing Editor Rick Berke which he was embarrassingly ill prepared to answer. Jones pointed to a copy of the Times and asked of Berke, “Give me one thing in there that happened today.” Berke put his hand over his mouth, looking stumped. Eventually he feebly answers that nothing in the paper happened “today”, but that some things happened before yesterday. When Jones then says that that makes the content of the paper even older, Berke responds with a strange, post-structuralist response, “that depends on your perspective.”

Yeah, I suppose from the perspective of someone reading today’s New York Times three days ago the news in it would not be old–a fun thought of experiment but one that has no relevance to the reality of a media company.

Of course, there are two good answers to Jones’ question. One is that you won’t get any breaking news in the New York Times because what they provide is not immediacy, but quality analysis and commentary on the most complicated issues of the day. But what I think the better answer would have been is one that even though the Times’ management knows is the right answer they’re still personally hesitant to give. Berke should have answered that the New York Times is a big media company, and the print version is a very small part of what they do.

But newspaper higher ups suffer from paper fetishism. You know what I’m talking about. People who get off on the upper middle class romanticism of the feel of paper, and ink on their fingers. Of course, that world is dying, and it is certainly a poor excuse for a business model.

I started working at the Miami Herald right as it was becoming clear that internet content would kill the printed paper. The Herald responded to the phenomenon casually late and with a series of long, boring, and useless meetings. I remember a specific meeting, sometime in 2005, where a relatively high manager, presented with a plan to expand on the content of the printed issue by adding supplemental content on the website, pondered why the Herald wasn’t doing the opposite–having limited content online that would be expanded in the newspaper.

Yes, these are the people running our newspapers.

Every year I revel in the montages coming out of CPAC, a tragicomic circle jerk of conservatives plotting how to fuck up the country and the world, or, when they’re not in power, how to derail the people trying to fix the country and the world.

And this year, they once again delivered.

But of course, CPAC 2007 is still, by far, the most awesome of them all.

I wonder what surprises and merriment CPAC 2010 will bring.

The Daily Show is loooking back at their first ten years. (Though I haven’t seen any clips of Craiggers Kilborn yet, whom I used to mimic in front of a mirror as a high school junior.) Remember Fort Lauderdale-native Ed Heeney?

Here’s the full Ed Heney segment; it’s worth it.