As an everyday exercise in self-discipline, I try to resist commenting on the New York Times’ banal and tin-eared OnTech newsletter, despite its impressive daily attempts to maintain a monotonic function of being “the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard”.
I previously suggested some ideas to perhaps make the newsletter more lively and self-aware, and hoped that would sustain my willpower.
But today my fortitude failed in the face of a thumbsucker entitled “What is Facebook?”. Despite writing about Facebook ad nauseum with absolute certainty about the company’s malevolence, the Times now admits to having more basic questions.
And as usual, the column lacks any self-awareness. Generally you can replace the target of any OnTech column with the Times itself and the story usually still makes sense. Why? Because the Times is often guilty of the same practices it finds so reprehensible in tech companies. Doing that search and replace on this piece nicely illustrates where the Times’ animosity for Facebook comes from:
| What is The New York Times? |
| The New York Times keeps dabbling in new things. Is it now an overstuffed mess, or a genius idea factory? |
| This question might sound silly, but I’m serious: What is The New York Times? Did you know that the New York Times has a summer school, online job listings, product reviews financed by affiliate fees, a collection of podcasts, a section just for students, a wine club, and its fastest growing businesses are recipes and crossword puzzles? The company also sells merchandise directly inside the Times and elsewhere. If you knew that The New York Times was doing all of this … gold star, I guess. You spend way too much time on the internet. These zillion experiments could transform The New York Times from the place where we read news stories and glanced at once lucrative glossy ads to — well, I don’t know what The New York Times might become. (The Times might not know, either.) The company’s constant tinkering raises the question: Is The New York Times trying so hard because it’s excited about what’s next, or perhaps because, like its peers, its traditional model has been destroyed by the digital revolution? … |