Thread by @gauravsabnis

Early morning introspective rambling 🧵 warning. Feel free to mute 🙈.

Today's topic is my relationship with The New York Times. It's complicated. And the whole Wordle acquisition storm in a teacup got me thinking about it. So here goes.

The relationship has evolved over the last 25 years or so. The biggest change is that I don't think of "NYT" as this monolithic top down entity run in a Murdochish way by Baquet, Sulzberger, Sims. It is, warts and all, a complex organism generally doing things right.

NYT messes up a lot. When it does, I join in bashing it on social media with others. But I also realize that those mistakes are
a) mistakes of a few people currently at NYT, not the entire organization
b) generally sins of omission not commission
c) comparatively less harmful

Basically I'd rather live in a world with an NYT than without. NYT and Washington Post are the only two real national newspapers of record remaining. Both owned by billionaires who have, from all appearances, not foisted their own ideology on the editorial staff like Murdoch.

Neither Sims nor Bezos are cute cuddly saints of course, but whatever their other sins, when it comes to NYT and WaPo, they have been hands off in that sense.

Now this is about the overall relationship, re ideology, politics, etc. But I'm also a paying customer of NYT.

On top of that, I'm also a New Yorker, and a lot of the paper is focused on us locals.

So for me, NYT isn't this external monolithic evil entity like Fox News or Republic TV. It's something I feel a part of. A stakeholder, if you will. I bash the Times to improve not kill it.

A big factor has also been living in the city itself. Which means It see that actual physical newspaper all around me. And each daily issue is so thick and filled with so much good content of such generally good quality, that physically holding it in your hands is different.

Holding that thick heavy newspaper, something like 125,000 words every single day, seeing how long it takes just to turn pages all the way, forget read all of them, it gives you a different appreciation for the product than seeing it in a browser or app.

So if I just think about NYT (and WaPo) as products, I have no complaints at all and in fact would be okay paying even more if they hiked their by rates.

My complaints are generally limited to the editorial side of things. And the op-ed choices. And "but her emails".

The thing is, as much as I'll never forget the selective "but her emails" thing which ended up helping Trump win, I still can't think of it as even the same zipcode as Murdoch's New York Post, which is just evil personified and is the only newspaper ever banned from Twitter.

I would rather live in a world with the New York Times than without it.

I would rather keep subscribing to a flawed but still generally well intentioned NYT than boycott it in pursuit of some ideal newspaper that never existed and never will.

NYT is not a monolith. It's a hive

But I also consider myself a stakeholder. So I'll keep subscribing to it, criticizing it when needed, hoping they don't make too many more mistakes or at least don't repeat them. Like I said, it's complicated. 😁

I'll end by saying that I have only read the entire New York Times page to page once in my life. As a bucket list task. Took me 3 days, between work and other stuff. 🤣
I used to finish off ToI between waking up and leaving for work. Not even a speed reader can do that to NYT.

P.S. Broadly speaking, NYT has never been like the evil greedy capitalist enterprise focused on profits above all. They are still a for-profit company. And they do a lot of stuff wrong. A lot.

But it's a flawed company not an evil company, in a time when evil companies rule.

Why Murdoch was obsessed with buying NYT after he managed to bulldoze his way into buying WSJ. One of the last 2 standing against his onslaught.

Pierce family storyline in #Succession was based on this chapter of the Murdoch story. Fascist billionaire vs liberal billionaires.