A waste of valuable space

The front page of the Sunday New York Times is probably the most valuable journalistic real estate in the world. It's where the Times puts its biggest investigative pieces, in the knowledge that people are much more likely to have the time and inclination to read long-form journalism on a Sunday than they are on other days.

Tomorrow, the Times is putting violins on its front page, in a story headlined "A Violin's Value, and What to Pay the I.R.S. Fiddler". It carries no fewer than three different bylines, including that of David Cay Johnston, the newspaper's tax-dodge expert. It even has a juicy news hook: Herbert Axelrod, who sold a collection of strings valued at $50 million to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, has now fled to Cuba, just before he was going to be indicted on federal tax fraud charges.

The story, however, is a complete and utter mess. The journalists' investigations clearly turned up nothing: there's actually no news at all in the whole piece. What we're left with is essentially three different feature stories, all of which are painfully incomplete, stitched together into a Frankenstein's monster of a front-page article.

First of all, of course, there's the Axelrod story. Apparently the tax fraud charges are "related to the sale of his publishing company," but we never learn anything about that. This piece is much more interested in his donations of string instruments, and how he may or may not have inflated their valuations for tax purposes. The donation we learn the most about is the one to the New Jersey Symphony, which paid $18 million for its 30 rare instruments from the 17th and 18th centuries. If Axelrod valued the strings at $50 million for tax purposes, then he could claim what the Times calls "a big tax deduction" on the difference. How big, however, we're never told.

Then there's a parallel story, about a previous Axelrod donation of four Stradivaris to the Smithsonian. Apparently that, too, was valued at $50 million, despite the fact that my own quick web search comes up with no records of any string instrument ever selling for more than $3.5 million. That's a factoid you won't find in the article either: there's no speculation at all about how much the Smithsonian Strads are worth, and in fact only the vaguest hand-waving when it comes to the true value of the instruments in New Jersey.

Encompassing both of these stories is a broader one about donations which carry inflated valuations for tax purposes. Apparently the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee is unhappy about the status quo, as is the person who reported Axelrod's donations to the IRS and hasn't received the $2.5 million reward he thinks he's owed.

But the IRS didn't comment for the story, and the only hard number that the reporters could come up with in order to help indicate the scope of the problem is that "about one in 11 reward claims is paid by the IRS," which apparently decreases any incentive to report suspicious activity. Since most reward claims are surely unrelated to overinflated donation valuations, however, the relevance of that statistic must be pretty low.

Then, to mess up matters even further, a completely different story is interwoven among the tax-fraud stories, all about how rare violins nearly always go up in value over time and how that "is leading players to consider newly made ones". Again, we get no hard numbers: no indication of what top violins are actually selling for these days, no idea of how fast violin prices are rising. Everything is anecdotal, and the piece ends with the story of "Christian Tetzlaff, 38, a German violinist regarded as one of the best of the younger generation of players," who used to play a Strad and now plays a Greiner violin built in 2001. This, of course, is completely irrelevant to the Axelrod and tax-fraud stories, but seems to have been thrown in just for the hell of it.

Reading the article is an exercise in frustration: it piques your interest with one story, then moves on to another, and another, and another, and never really cleans up on any of them. It's like reading a sentence where successive parenthetical comments keep on being opened up but never closed. What it is doing on the front page of the New York Times? I have no idea, but my suspicion is that a front-page editor somewhere had the bright idea that if you amalgamated three or four mediocre stories, you could get one really good one. Well, a good friend of mine is a front-page editor elsewhere, and I'd like to show this article to him as a prime example of how that simply doesn't work.

Posted by Felix at 17:48 EST