Rather than start with what's in the New York Times, we start with news about it. The Paper of Record, the Old Gray Lady, badly in need of Botox, has started selling ad space on the front page. The paper is also considering selling their stake in the Boston Red Sox to stave off impending bankruptcy. This should surprise no one. The Times has been heading down this path for more than ten years with the effort to market the paper nationally, as the intellectual's alternative to USA Today. This, from the outset, was dumb.The Times could never be a truly national newspaper, simply because half the stories, even in the "national" editon, have to do with the the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metroplex and don't matter to anyone else. A scandalous borough president in Brooklyn just isn't going to matter much to people in Dallas or Pittsburgh.
Secondly, any business model based on distributing old school, paper-and-ink newspapers across North America every morning was doomed to fail, which has been obvious to anyone with a computer since 1996. But the advent of Craigslist was the true disaster, ensuring newspapers will simply never again have the kind of revenue stream they once enjoyed.
The Times, and most other failing publications around the country, will continue to exist -- at about a third of their present size As the Christian Science Monitor did last year, more and more newspapers will go digital only, employing plenty of content creators, but far fewer printers and truck drivers. Big deal. In the long history of capitalism's creative destruction, the supposed Death of Journalism looks lot more like a minor shift in distribution.
Speaking of the Monitor, the have a nicely balanced piece on almost-erstwhile President Bush, noting Bush gets "little credit for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein." Nor is there "much praise for his oft-voiced calls for democracy among the presently unfree peoples around the world."
What went wrong? "First, there was resentment at the manner of the demands. They were interpreted as an imperious diktat from a powerful America." The successful invasion of Iraq was succeeded by a slew of post-war political and economic blunders that "made it a poor example of American nation-building." Finally, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, rightly or wrongly, became "tragic symbols of what was perceived to be inhumane American treatment."
The author has salient advice for how the incoming administration might improve America's image: Give a major speech in Muslim capital. To us, that sounds like a fine idea. A gesture of trust and goodwill towards the Muslim world, a speech like that could be seen live by hundreds of millions, maybe billions. We'd sure watch. Whatever the country does and doesn't know about Obama's policies, the man clearly, in Emerson's phrase, is "fit to stand the gaze of millions," with a magnificent grasp of his own symbolic power.
