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Heavy
hitting Yahoo! News Features Leave New York Times Scrambling
—by
Richard Aaron Wright
http://nytimes.com
| http://yahoo.com
October 25, 2006, NEW YORK — The editorial board of the venerable
newspaper that has long thrived as the purveyor of “All the
news that’s fit to print” called an emergency meeting
last week to confront the growing problem of disillusionment in
readers who have traded up for harder-hitting news sources in an
increasingly diversified online environment of competent journalism.
Yahoo!’s headlines on its homepage have begun to take the
lion’s share of readers away from this 157 year old New York
institution of news, with effective news headlines catering to America’s
growing concerns for itself. “Does the color of candy influence
how much you eat?” headlined a October 25th Yahoo! feature
section under the banners of other resources linking viewers to
relevant matters such as Entertainment, Sports and Life issues.
Other headlines on the Yahoo! Featured page included “Freshman
15’ hits males harder,” and “How many calories
in your coffee cup?”
Gail Collins, editorial page editor at The New York Times,
stood confident among her fellow Pulitzer prize winning writers
yesterday, disillusioned with the paper’s continued decline
in readership that analysts say is a continuing downward trend in
the paper’s reputation as a valuable news source.
“We’ve continued running with stories on education,
politics and the state of morality in today’s society while
we should be focusing on forceful stories that affect the individual,”
Collins lectured. Her coffee stained teeth formed a grimace revealing
of the general state of distress relayed publicly in a recent report
issued by the The New York Times’ Board of Directors.
“What we need is more stories about the self,” Collins
shouted.
A brief analysis of the Manhattan-based newspaper's front page
revealed the mistakes in coverage by this paper’s editors,
with unexceptional headlines on the state of the United States’
economy, failed efforts with ongoing wars in the Middle East, and
an especially insignificant story on Vietnam’s ongoing economic
boom. A single headline detailing the struggles of Detroit’s
weakened baseball team in this year’s Baseball World Series
had been relegated to the side of the website’s main screen.
“They're so dumb. I've never been invited to be friends with
them. Me and my friends are better reporters in cyberspace because
we talk about what's really news,” commented a MySpace blogger
with the handle TrixterGal82. “It really is a serious sign
of journalists being out of touch with what is most important to
me.”
Others are more dismissive of the recent downward spiral in readership
in national dailies such as The Washington Post, and Europe’s
once venerable London Times. William Safire, a former presidential
speech writer and syndicated columnist, sees things differently.
“Undaunted readership spawned from our Greatest Generation
generally neglects the post de facto pundits who scribe
our most momentous narratives,” Safire wrote in an open letter
that was reprinted in his original longhand written with a feathered
quill on yellow legal paper. “What readers need is more language
that confounds the senses about themes and places that are completely
foreign to them. That’s what makes a newspaper worthy.”
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