October 31st, 2006
Fiddling while Rome burns
Yesterday, in a parenthetical at the end of a post about Ben Stein (someone who has admirably figured out how to monetize every ounce of himself), I posed this question: Why is Joe Nocera, one of the New York Times’s most incisive, provocative, and lucid columnists, buried away in the Saturday paper?
Well, I got the answer (from many, many, many, many people), and it’s an obvious one (and one that, at some point, I actually knew). When Nocera was hired, the Times was in a tizzy about the Wall Street Journal’s “Weekend Edition,” which was designed to offer soft-focus, lifestyle-y features (and which is delivered to empty offices around the country every Saturday). (I kid! It’s delivered to your home. As long as you go through customer service in order to get that one paper re-routed.)
I understand that rationale: while the Times’s and the Journal’s audience has less of an overlap than you might think, it isn’t insignificant, and it’s not like any newspaper can afford to lose readers or advertisers these days. (You may ask yourself, ‘Self, why did it made sense to combat an avowedly soft-news edition of an otherwise hard-core business paper with one of the country’s best business colimnists?’ And you may say to yourself, ‘I have no idea.’)
But now, a little over a year later, the Journal’s “Weekend Edition” is…not exactly a failure, but certainly not a resounding success, either. (In the last reporting period, the Weekend Journal was among the leaders in circulation losses, falling 6.7 percent, compared to 2 percent for the Journal’s daily paper and about 3.5 percent for the Times and the Washington Post.)
Putting Nocera in the Saturday paper doesn’t reek of the sort of desperate knee-jerkism that resulted in the Times launching a hurried “Escapes” section on April 5, 2002…which just happened to be four days before the Journal introduced its long-planned (and reasonably successful) “Personal Journal.” It does, however, touch on a persistent (and annoying) oddity of the media business: the extent to which newspapers (and magazines) often make decisions based on how their competitors will react as opposed to what best serves their readers. It happens time and time again: if the Post gets a big scoop, the Times will more than likely play it down (if they cover it at all). If Newsweek comes out with a big package on corporate welfare, you can sure as hell bet Time won’t be doing anything similar any time soon (regardless of whether or not they had something in the works). And to what end? How many of the Washington Post’s readers also read the Times? And would any of that relatively miniscule number be that bothered by seeing a similar story in another paper? The answer, clearly, is no. But for some inane reason, mis-placed institutional pride — we will not follow someone else’s reporting, dammit! — is put ahead of what would best serve customers/readers. (This is the industry, after all, that says it needs to be protected because it’s acting as a public trust…and an industry that has a whole mess of sky-is-falling doomsayers these days.)
So I’ll amend my question: How many of the Times’s advertisers or readers are currently trying to decide between the paper’s Saturday edition and the weekend edition of the Journal? And how many people are losing out by missing Nocera’s column each week? Anyone? Anyone?
(Oh, also: no, I don’t really think Ben Stein is the world’s best columnist. But gosh darn is he a big cutey.)
October 30th, 2006
America proves it has some taste
It looks like the certifiably noxious Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is about the cancelled. Confused by the generally positive reviews? You shouldn’t be: the only people who could possibly be able to keep a straight face while watching a show that acts as if the moral future of the country depends on whether some over-paid narcissistic sketch comedy writer can force a skit about dumb conservatives onto the air are those directly involved in television and those who write about it for a living. (That was quite a sentence, huh?) (Don’t be surprised if the next episode contains some snarky allusion to the playa-haters out there; anyone who’s watched even one episode knows that yes, Aaron Sorkin really is that obsessively solipsistic, and not in a funny, you-need-to-be-in-on-the-joke-to-get-it-but-then-it’s-oh-so-worth-it kind of way.)
(For anyone who wants to watch a good (and occasionally great) show about a Saturday Night Live-esque outfit, check out 30 Rock. There’s no other way to say this: Alec Baldwin is a comic genius. (And Tracy Morgan is a Jedi with four hearts.))
October 30th, 2006
For those of you who think I’m a shill for the Sox front office…
…here’s a move I don’t get: the re-signing of Mike Timlin. I know the guy has been a stopgap these last few years, but that’s sort of like saying the 2000 election fiasco was a stopgap to a Bush presidency; all it really did was delay the inevitable. I also know, as the Sox took pains to point out in their press release, that Timlin had a 1.40 ERA before he went on the DL at the end of May.
But man, did he ever look like a guy who’d fallen off a cliff when he came back in June (and if a lingering injury caused him to suck that bad, shouldn’t he have stayed on the DL?). You could make a pretty decent argument that it was the sheer awfulness of Timlin that was the turning point in the Sox’s season, more than the absence of Varitek, more than the absence of Wakefield, more than the death of Nelson De La Rosa. (I know he didn’t die until last week, but c’mon: you all know he wasn’t able to focus his full karmic energy on Yawkey Way.) Starting just before the five-game bloodletting at the hands of the Yankees, Timlin single-handedly blew enough games to send the Sox well into second place. And there was also that little matter of him blaming the offense for the Sox’s problems. For those of you who mercifully managed to miss that, I’m not joking.
The arguments for keeping Mike on board are that he’s been a bargain for the four years he’s been in Boston; he’s pitched well — sometimes very well; relief pitching is both hard to come by and hard to predict; it’d put a strain on the clubhouse to lose yet another veteran (and besides, who would lead chapel?); and the $1 or $2 million he’ll cost the team is peanuts relative to a $125 million payroll.
The arguments against re-signing Timlin are that you don’t pay for past performance; he hasn’t pitched well in more than half a season, and when he wasn’t pitching well it sure looked like more than a flukey, post-injury type of deal; he’s shown he has the potentially put plenty of strain on the clubhouse if he is around; and every now and then you find someone like David Ortiz for $1 or $2 million.
(Please note: if Mike Timlin comes back and has a season more in line with ‘03 and ‘04 and less in line with the second half of ‘06, I reserve the right to make like one of those paid sportswriters and act like he’s been my favorite player all along and that re-signing him was one of the front office’s most brilliant moves.)
October 30th, 2006
Introducing the world’s best columnist
Okay, I’m overstating things a bit; I was stymied in my efforts to come up with a headline that punned off of either “Ferris Bueller” or “Win Ben Stein’s Money.” So without further throatclearing: the New York Times’s best columnist is not Paul Krugman or Tom Friedman or Maureen Dowd. It’s Ben Stein, who’s been quietly penning a column for the Sunday Business section titled “Everybody’s Money.”
I say quietly because Sunday is ugly stepdaughter of the Business department (although recent efforts to improve its quality have resulted in marked improvement). The people who cherish the Sunday Times — you know, the “she reads the Book Review, I do the crossword” people — are the liberal arts, self-styled intellectual types who want to read about books (even if they don’t read books), or want to be up-to-date on the arts world (even if they don’t actually go to museums). Business folk, on the other hand, are not reaching for a door stopper-sized paper on Sundays. They get their news during the actual work-week; that’s why the Wall Street Journal doesn’t even bother publishing on Sundays. (Its recent Saturday edition was created mainly to draw in more women readers.) A recent stilted effort to move the Times media coverage from Monday to Sunday died a quick death when the paper’s media writers staged a mini-revolt.
But I digress. Stein’s column — this week’s was about the total lack of shame in corporate America — isn’t so good because it’s well-written and easy to understand, although it’s both. Its strength lies in the fact that many of Stein’s columns seem to go against what you’d assume Stein’s views to be; a life-long Republican and former speech writer and lawyer in the Nixon administration could reasonably be assumed to be a deranged firebreather (think Pat Buchanan) or at least a reliable conservative (think William Safire). But a surprising number of Stein’s columns decry the greed (and stupidity) or corporate America. What’s more, Stein’s pieces seem more affable than angry. He’s not shouting from the treetops or preaching to the converted, which is the trap most opinion-mongers on both sides of the aisle fall into. He likes money. He likes being well off. But he doesn’t let that, or his political affiliation, blind him to the realities of our current economic environment.
So let me be the first to call for freeing Ben Stein from Sunday’s purgatory. Let’s move the man to the actual Op-Ed page! He’d certainly stand out. And that’d be a good thing.
(As an aside/addendum, Joe Nocera, who was poached from Fortune this past April, may very well be the Times’s best on-staff columnist. I get why he’s in the paper’s Business section and not on the Op-Ed page…but why, in God’s name, is he relegated to Saturday, the least-read paper of the week? Anyone? Anyone?)
October 28th, 2006
On the plus side, Tony La Russa’s still is under .500 in World Series games
There were a number of very weird things about this year’s Fall Classic.
* For the first time ever, Tony La Russa was involved in a World Series that went more than four games (although that may have only been because of Kenny Rogers’s extra, um, assistance).
* David Eckstein passed himself off as a power threat.
* The Detroit Tigers pitching staff singlehandedly lost the Series on their errors. I guess there are some drawbacks to having such a young pitching staff.
* Jeff Weaver somehow transformed himself into a big game pitcher.
Now we can focus on the hot stove season. And honestly, I’ll get around to those post season wrapups…
October 28th, 2006
It was either that or run a bed and breakfast
“Mr. Jensen, who had previously rejected an offer of The Village Voice’s editor inn chief position, said that he had been offered the new position this week. One of his initial duties will be to hire Web designers and employees for the expanded Web sites of the 17 newspapers owned by the company.” (Emphasis added)
– “Village Voice Stalwart Resigns in Latest Post-Merger Shake-up”
The New York Times
October 28. 2006
October 26th, 2006
She sure as hell blew her cover on that one
“And then there is the matter of which friends to include and which to leave out — a problem that plagued Nancy Pinckert, and her husband, Byron, 56, both architects, when they chose nine people to join them last month for a luxurious three-night hotel stay at the Calistoga Ranch in the Napa Valley, complete with minibus transportation to wine and olive-oil tastings and dinner at the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif.
Ms. Pinckert, whose 50th birthday the trip celebrated, said she was careful not to mention it to friends she didn’t invite. ‘We thought about explaining why we couldn’t ask them,’ she said. ‘But no matter how you try to position it, people feel rejected.’”
– “A Deluxe Vacation, Your Friends Included”
by Shivani Vora
The New York Times
October 26, 2006
