[All the {well-educated, taste-making, media-controlling-parents-having, only-people-you-seem-to-hear-about} kids are doin' it.]
We were watching 30 Rock the other day, and there was this episode where Lemon (Tina Fey) totally owned Josh (generic Jewish funnyman) during the latter's contract negotiation. Besides making him do the worm, Lemon makes Josh list off ways that she's better than him. One of them, which made me laugh, was when he yelled out "You read the newspaper!" And she says, "Yeah, it's true." Who reads the newspaper anymore? Masochists we are, we picked up the Saturday NYT the other day to try to fill in correctly one or two pieces of the crossword. Of course, we had a hard time finding the crossword, for a paradoxical reason--the paper was so thin that we thought we lost a section. What did it have, about 15 pages total? That's a goddamn shame. Thinking about it, we decided we'd have been better served giving the dollar to the homeless, or, like, putting it toward a latte at Starbucks.
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Add that to the Times Select on-line wall, and you're left with a double-forked plan to kill readership (maybe?). You can't read everything online, but when you actually buy the paper you're inevitably disappointed because it's, like, a ten-minute read. If we wanted ten-minute reads, we'd totally read FP Passport and The Ag. Oh, what's that? Yeah, we do.
[See above.]
FP Passport collects various World News stories together in an intelligent fashion. For instance, we learned yesterday that we share a birthday with the Six-Days War. Interesting! Besides which, we were alerted that the G8 meetings are going to be a shitstorm, and that the next Cold War is on the horizon.
The Ag collects news and presents it in the cutesy Harper's Week in Review and Findings style. This style is awesome. NYT take note: what the people want isn't reliable reporting (over which point print can hardly claim superiority over Internets), they want conceptually interesting presentations or even re-presentations of the news. If the past is doomed to repeat itself, and every presentation is already a re-presentation anyway, etc., etc., then why not hire some of the Harper's editors and have them turn your publication into something interesting-on-the-page-to-look-at. Your both heart-run-dry-from-bleeding-so-profusely liberal rags anyway.
