One of the oddities of the NYT and criticism of it (and I'm actually very critical - Post is generally much better paper) is that people who are most critical are the ones who rely on it apparently for all their information. Not a good idea!
2/ Let me expand a bit on this. First, we criticize the Times because it has IMMENSE influence and it has greater resources and ability to unearth information really any other paper in the world. That's a great reason to hold it to high standards. But as someone who ...
3/ has spent years mining reportage for factual details and nuggets of information I can make use of there's an important aspect of much fo the Times coverage that is important to understand. The Times does a lot of great original reporting. But a very large percentage ...
4/ of their reporting is of a slightly different sort. Other publications will do the first rounds of reporting, go more granular, get the nitty gritty and then the Times will come in a bit later and write out what is a bit more like an overview of the whole thing.
5/ The mentality or concept seems to be 'a lot of spadework has been done and now we're going to come in and put it all together, show you the big picture.' In some ways that is almost the definition of being and seeing yourself institutionally as the "paper of record."
6/ But often that overview is filled with a significant amount of editorial gloss, assumptions about how the world works and doesn't work. And more than anything else is VERY GENERAL. Again, my career is a journalist and a reporter has been perhaps most than others ...
7/ a mix of my own reporting and mining the reporting of others (with credit) looking for those nuggets of new information, details. Those are like gold is for a miner. That's what you're looking for. The rest is dross and you sift it away. Those are building blocks ...
8/ for finding out what is actually happening. As a general matter Times stories have many fewer of those than comparable reports in the Post. It's just not that their thing. Now again, the Times also publishes a lot of blockbuster original reports. I'm not saying they ...
9/ don't exist. They absolutely do. And the number of best in class journalists who work at the place almost can't be numbered. I'm talking IN GENERAL. Most of the stuff. Generally speaking those nuggets aren't there. Because that's not really the point. In fact it's so much ...
10/ the case that there's a kind of funny pattern. Not infrequently you'll have one of these generalized summing up stories in the Times (which they often write as though they're the first on the story) and it's all stuff that if you're paying attention is a less detailed ...
11/ version of stuff that's all been reported elsewhere in recent days. And then way down at the bottom almost offhandedly they'll mention some new detail that is actually a big deal. But again, almost as an afterthought. And the Times can do that because they've got a ...
12/ ton of really talented reporters and info blockades and sealed lips just fall and open up when they're close to the magnetic field of a Times reporter. They're calls always get answers. The details are just easier to mine out. They're the Times. But again, as a paper ...
13/ in general, the detail and nuggets of gold thing just isn't what they do.
14/ One final point: The key problem is that those glosses and editorial assumptions are often simply wrong or at least contestable. But as a general matter this is treated as a feature, not a bug. And there's some reality to that. I can hear in my head the voices of ...
15/ various friends who work at the Times saying, "Josh, that's right. We're not writing for people like you who are obsessed with the story. We're writing for people who aren't up to speed on it." And there's some real logic to that. But if you are a reader it's important ...
16/ to know the framework, the model, the strategies of the publication you're reading.
