Stefan Geens on the New York Times

Stefan Geens, once a journalist himself, really ought to know better. He's just published a bizarre essay on his website, which alternates between bog-standard European superciliousness ("Go ahead," he tells the New York Times, "become openly slanted, crusading, editorial, the way that European papers are") and utter idiocy (the Wall Street Journal "is clearly thriving where the NYT is stagnant").

It's not entirely clear what Stefan's point is, beyond the fact that he likes the Journal more than the Times. But his arguments are ridiculous. "How is a newspaper supposed to compete these days?" he asks, apropos of the World Wide Web. "The New York Times a while ago decided to compete by becoming more like that other unquestionably compelling toilet read, The New Yorker, with long meandering articles that go in-depth in ways that Reuters and AP do not." He says this in response to my article on reporting simple news, but he gets his chronology completely wrong. The long meandering articles predate the rise of news websites, and are much more the product of American journalistic self-importance than they are of a need to compete with cyberjournalism.

If Stefan can trot out tired old canards like the one about the way in which American newspapers should embrace an editorial viewpoint, then I can rehearse the old observation that most American newspapers don't, in fact, compete with anybody at all, and that this is why they're often so dry and puffed-up. European newspapers are nearly all national, while US newspapers have metropolitan monopolies: the New York Times in New York, the Boston Globe in Boston, and so on. Very, very few cities have real competition between newspapers, which means that both readers and advertisers are stuck with one paper. This is not, quite obviously, a recipe for innovation.

What does happen, on the other hand, is that journalists start to write not with their readers in mind, but looking more towards higher notions such as Posterity and the Fourth Estate. Only in America would a major motion picture be made about a scandalette in which a magazine journalist was caught inventing stories. I shan't belabor the point, as Anthony Lane has made it much better than I ever could. But in a nutshell, American journalists, at least in their own minds, are a pillar of the constitution, while the Brits are writing tommorrow's fish-and-chips wrapping.

In any case, for what it's worth, I agree that there's no such thing as objective journalism, and that it's better to embrace that fact and be opinionated than it is to fight it and desperately attempt to tread an inoffensive middle ground at all times. But that's where I part ways with Geens. For one thing, he seems to think that it would be a reaslly good idea were the Times to write long-form articles: he even tells the mandarins on 43rd Street "to poach some of those editors at The New Yorker". In order to back up this assertion, he points to the popularity of the Journal's Middle Column.

This is simply confused. For one thing, the Middle Column is closer to the New Yorker's short-but-perfectly-formed Talk of the Town pieces than it is to the heavier, longer features. There's one Middle Column story per day, and it provides an oasis of light relief amidst the relentless dullness of the rest of the paper. While the New Yorker rises or falls on the strength of its long-form journalism, the Journal's strength is its business reporting, which is generally written in a very straightforward manner.

So it's ironic, then, that Stefan says that "writing short straight news is a recipe for decline into irrelevancy" at the same time as praising the very organ which does short straight news better than anybody else.

But that's not the only way in which Stefan is dreadfully confused. His statement that the Journal is "is clearly thriving where the NYT is stagnant" is linked to a story in the Wall Street Journal about the newspaper industry's twice-yearly circulation report. In it, we find that daily circulation for US newspapers was up 0.2%. The New York Times outperformed, rising by 0.5% – more than twice the average – while the Wall Street Journal underperformed, rising by, um, 0.002%.

What the Journal did do, however, was start adding 290,412 of the paying subscribers to its website to its circulation figures; it was this one-off statistical sleight-of-hand which gave the surely completely objective Matthew Rose the ability to lead his story with his own paper's "16% circulation gain".

Of course, those 290,412 subscribers at $79 a year for the website only – or even the 686,000 people with access to the Journal's webiste at all – are a mere fraction of the 9,109,000 unique visitors that nytimes.com got in September. Stefan's all over himself praising the Journal for being "merely a record of the state of the newsroom's reporting efforts at the end of the day," when in fact many more people read the Times on an intraday basis than keep abreast of what the Journal is reporting to its select group of subscribers.

By this point, Geens has pretty much lost the plot entirely. He criticises the vaguely-liberal Times editorial page for being more strident than it should be, in the same breath as saying that the Economist "smudges the line between informing and opining in ways American media should emulate". Surely, the Belgian is the only person on the planet who thinks that the New York Times editorial page is more strident than the editorials which constitute the beginning – and the front cover – of every issue of the Economist.

We shall pass over without comment Stefan's discovery that "wifi plus laptop actually makes for great toilet reading". But at least today's newspaper can be dragooned into a vital secondary purpose in the case of emergency; Stefan's verbiage, unfortunately, cannot, despite being much better suited to the task.

Posted by Felix at 2:20 EST

Comments

Nevermind the personal invective, what arguments can we cull from this Tourettic spectacle?

1. The WSJ is full of "relentless dullness".
2. This relentless dullness is made up of straight news.
3. The NYT is doing better than the WSJ.

Therefore, The NYT should start writing more straight news articles like the WSJ. Brilliant analytics, Felix.

But in any case, I disagree with your postulates. Let me (re)count the ways (:

1. As I wrote, the WSJ is a unique case. As the daily catechism of high finance, it can ask for and receive tithes from its online coreligionists. This allows it to count online subscriptions in circulation figures. To deny them that is like disallowing DVD sales towards gross film revenues because it is a "new" medium.

2. I never said the longer stories in the NYT were a reaction to cyberjournalism, but that they are an ongoing response to a much broader crowding of the news market, from radio, newsreels, television and now the web. Yes, crusading and investigative journalism has become a hallmark of papers, because they see it as their niche. And they are right.

3. Read this piece by Dan Bilefsky, or this one by Daniel Pearl, and tell me again where it belongs in the New Yorker.

4. "European newspapers are nearly all national." Only in the UK and France, but for you that must be Europe. European papers are city-based, and where one city dominates the national landscape, then they are also national. Barcelona vs Madrid, Rome vs Milan, Berlin vs. Frankfurt, Brussels vs Antwerp all make a lie of your blanket statement.

5. "US newspapers have metropolitan monopolies: the New York Times in New York..." I'd call that utter idiocy but then you'd still be at my level. Clearly, the NYT has competition.

Posted by: Stefan Geens at 12:37 EST, November 09, 2003