This morning, Robin and I were reading the New York Times over breakfast. Per usual, I started with the business section so she could start with the front page. When we swapped, I started reading "Apple, Digital Music's Angel, Earns Record Industry's Scorn" (great story, whole other post about how the record labels struggle to understand or even care about their own customers). But it immediately jumped to the Business section, which Robin was reading.
To my mind, this is the fundamentally arrogant attitude that is at the core of all of the New York Times' problems in this modern day: business or editorial (even though it increased circulation slightly this year). Most other daily newspapers have recognized that they are often read by more than one person at a time and jump their stories inside a section. That means they don't create conflict among closely related people and they make it easy for an individual reader to actually finish a story in one reading. In other words, they put the customer first, before their own archaic notions of how a newspaper should operate.
The New York Times appears to believe that it is such a must-read that it does not need to satisfy customer interests and that the customers will do what they need to suffer inconvenience. At some point, each customer will ultimately decide (perhaps by switching to another newspaper, perhaps by just using the Web version of the NY Times) not to continue to pay the New York Times for the privilege of being abused by its print edition.
that pisses me off too!!!!
Posted by: tony conrad | September 01, 2005 at 04:47 PM