The paper felt light this morning, as it often does on a Monday in August, only more so. The columns on the right-hand side of the front page looked a little narrower than usual, and I didn’t know why.
Then I looked to the left and saw the note: today the New York Times switched to its smaller sheet size.
Unsurprisingly, I hate it. It lacks the impact, the heft, the ability to convey significant information on a single page. The accordion fold on the subway creates a meek, finished-too-fast column of text. It makes the paper feel less significant, less worth the cover price, less important.
Of course, the Times’s news coverage hasn’t dropped; some of it has simply gotten shorter or moved online. But–and I say this fully aware of the irony–I don’t really want to go to a website for continuations of content I’m reading offline. Despite my thorough online lifestyle, I am resolutely committed to reading the printed newspaper every day. I look forward to it. I have nothing to gain by reading most of the paper, I want to read all of it, and to use nytimes.com for its blogs and for sharing items with friends, not to get extra scoops or a handful of letters to the editor that I used to be able to read in print. I also find it mildly hypocritical that the Times cites rising costs in its resizing decision, when it raised the newsstand price a full 25 percent just weeks earlier.
I know that newsprint is increasingly expensive, and that readership of the print edition is down, and that my desire for the old-fashioned edition makes me something of a fuddy-duddy and a nimbyist. At some point I’m sure I’ll get used to it, just as people always adapt to change. But the new style of the New York Times, by being 11% smaller, is, for the time being, making the Times itself feel 11% lesser.
Category: Media (Page 3 of 8)
Michael Moore’s new movie, Sicko, aims for the gut. Like the old adage, it will make you laugh, it will make you cry, it will make you want to bring the entire family, not to mention every public office, medical, health care and insurance professional you know. It will make you applaud at the end. And it will thoroughly embarrass you for being complicit in a system that has failed the people it is supposed to help.
See this movie.
I read both the New York Times and The Economist, which gives me a terrific
point-counterpoint on hot-button issues in global news.
This week:
Battle Over the Banlieues, the New York Times Magazine. “[What Sarkozy said
at the riots] was the antithesis of what a government minister was expected
to say. … I canât remember a single political conversation in any of the cités I have visited in the last year, on any subject—jobs, discrimination, France herself—that wasnât prefaced by at least a few almost ritualistic denunciations of Sarkozy.”
vs.
France’s Chance: After a quarter-century of drift Nicolas Sarkozy offers the
best hope of reform, The Economist. “He is the only candidate brave enough
to advocate the ‘rupture’ with its past that France needs after so many
gloomy years. It has been said that France advances by revolution from time
to time but seldom, if ever, manages to reform. Mr Sarkozy offers at least a
chance of proving this aphorism wrong.”
One of my favorite diversions in my teens and 20s was the animated or comedy short. Beginning with cartoons, I suppose, and expanding with my immersion into MTV culture—including “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” which MTV ran in the 1980s—I’ve always enjoyed five-minute shorts.
I don’t delve into online video all that much, but YouTube has some great MTV shorts available. My next few free nights will be spent enjoying Sifl and Olly and the original, wordless Aeon Flux pieces. “Liquid Television,” we hardly knew you.
(See also: Pitchfork’s 100 Awesome Music Videos.)
This week’s New York Magazine Approval Matrix (which is a don’t-miss treat every week) includes this approving nugget on “Mission: Impossible III”: “The kidnapping in ‘M:I:III,’ involving spilled wine, body doubles, voice modulation, and an exploding Lamborghini—just the kind of awesome Bond-movie scene that doesn’t appear in Bond movies anymore.”
Not only is this completely true, it also gave me a realization: Tom Cruise wants to be—nay, in “M:I:III” he has become—the next James Bond.
Compare these basic facts about Bond movies (pre-Timothy Dalton, anyway) with Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt in “M:I:III.”
• Bond: Tall, dark, handsome, dapper, well-versed in etiquette and perfect comportment. Hunt: Dark, handsome (not tall), dapper, well-versed in etiquette and perfect comportment. Hunt is not British, although Cruise could work on an accent.
• Bond: Operates as a secret agent on confidential assignments revealed to no one, including the woman in his life. Hunt: Operates as a secret agent on confidential assignments revealed to no one, including the woman in his life.
• Bond: Has an incredible arsenal of gadgets and clever methods of getting into and out of difficult situations. Hunt: Has an incredible arsenal of gadgets and clever methods of getting into and out of difficult situations. Instead of geeky Q, Hunt has sidekick Luther.
• Bond: Really knows how to wear a tux. Hunt: Really knows how to wear a million-dollar rappelling contraption.
• Bond: Often goes into missions with a second agent or to finish another 00’s work. Hunt: Goes into his first mission to rescue a kidnapped agent, then finishes her work. “Mission: Impossible” used to be about a team of experts, but the latest sequel makes Hunt the main executor.
• Bond: Drives fantastic cars and visits exotic international locations. Hunt: Is seen in fantastic cars (such as a Lamborghini) and visits exotic international locations (including Rome and Shanghai).
• Bond: Knows how to shoot a gun and isn’t afraid to kill those who stand in his way. Hunt: Knows how to shoot a gun and isn’t afraid to kill those who stand in his way.
• Bond: Performs mysteriously dextrous stunts for a man in a tuxedo. Hunt: Regularly performs dextrous stunts for a man in a million-dollar rappelling contraption.
• Bond: After saving the world from near-distruction, his superiors want him to immediately get back to work, although he chooses to kick back instead. Hunt: After saving America from near-distruction, his superiors want him to immediately get back to work, although he chooses to kick back instead.
• Bond: Gets the girl. And sometimes several. Hunt: Saves the girl, in this case his new bride. Which is very un-Bond, but still.
If Cruise could nail a British accent he’d have it made. Except, of course, that being James Bond doesn’t pay nearly as well as simply being Tom Cruise.
OK, so I liked the TV show “Ed” when it was on, which predisposes me to enjoying Tom Cavanagh. And I’m in my 30s. And I live in New York City. And I love music. Obviously, that means I should like Love Monkey, Cavanagh’s new show about all of the above. And I absolutely do like it: from the obvious but enjoyable boy-girl interplay to the four-friends underpinnings to the theme of having and pursuing a passion (and also to Cavanagh’s trademark rambling soliloquies, which seem to have rubbed off on me). I don’t know that it has the broad appeal to become a mainstay of CBS’s otherwise bread-and-butter lineup, but I sure hope it does. I may even discover some good new music while I’m at it.
As if the show weren’t appealing enough, its theme song is “Someone Who’s Cool,” one of the better tracks by the Odds, a little-known Beatlesque power-pop band from Canada that I have come to adore over the years. Having one’s song become a TV theme is hardly the road to fame—ask The Rembrandts, Mach Five and countless others—but the recognition is fun.
Also fun is that three of the four main characters of “Ed” have returned to substantial television roles this season. Ah, Stuckey Bowl, we hardly knew you.
One of the biggest lessons to learn in business is how to communicate with warmth and appreciativeness, even to a perceived adversary. It’s a lesson I use nearly every day, and one I am constantly fine-tuning and trying to improve.
One of the biggest lessons in life in general is not to be a sore winner. This is evident in myriad public competitions, from newly elected political candidates congratulating their opponents on “a hard-fought race” to athletes like football’s Brett Favre pausing mid-celebration to shake hands with the opposition.
Somehow, the gentle and polite Randal Pinkett missed both these lessons. The winner of season four of “The Apprentice,” Randal, upon being hired, strongly said no to the suggestion of Donald Trump’s hiring Rebecca Jarvis, Randal’s impressive (and formerly friendly) competitor.
I personally can’t figure this one out. What did Randal have to lose by welcoming Rebecca into the fold? He apparently disliked the prospect of not being the apprentice, and I’m tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt: that when at the boardroom table opposite the Donald, the only thing a candidate considers is his or her own survival.
But in rebuffing Rebecca, he became the instant enemy of all her fans, and likely lowered his prospects for book deals, speaking engagements, and long-term success in the public arena. It was a huge misstep by someone whose grace under fire was celebrated by his teammates.
Randal could have had it both ways. The right answer to Trump’s suggestion of hiring Rebecca? “Mr. Trump, I am proud to be The Apprentice, and with that matter settled, I would be equally proud to have Rebecca join us in the Trump organization.” Randal has a title, Rebecca has a job, and they could both enter into years of public glory.
I suppose winning with style is a lesson that Trump can try and teach his new apprentice.
The Economist launched a redesigned economist.com this week. New pages are preset to 1024 width (nice for advertising, less so for the 29% of Americans still surfing at 800×600) with a colorful top- and left-nav scheme. The basic design is modern and stylish. Online exclusives, like city and country guides, have been made much more prominent.
Lots of nice touches surround the content. I particularly like the muted color offsets and the robust footer, and the integration of items like Backgrounders is much better. And, of course, I appreciate that the Economist.com logo (which I created, pat pat) is still in use.
I have quibbles, but they are few. The light font colors on the home page detract from the power of the headlines, and the white space surrounding the content seems a little arbitrary. Economist.com hasn’t gotten around to updating its section indexes, either, which suggest the site was pushing to a deadline.
On a personal note, this redesign is a little bittersweet. Economist.com was overdue for an overhaul, but the new site marks the conclusion of my work in commercial web design. While I segued out of design several years ago, Economist.com lived on, and the fact that it was live for five years—my redesign launched this week in 2000—was my proudest design achievement. Now that it’s changed, I am somewhat saddened at the realization that my old career is officially gone.
Congratulations and good luck to the Economist online staff. May the new site serve you as well as the old.
The New York Times’ new print edition business section debuted today, but it doesn’t seem to add much to the existing mix. The most important shift seems to be the cutesy renaming of the feature coverage:
Business travel: “Itineraries”
Commercial real estate: “Square Feet”
Technology: “Circuits” (this was pre-existing, but now it has context)
Wall Street analysis: “Street Scene”
Because hell, if I didn’t find commercial real estate exciting before, I am going to be just tickled pink to flip to Square Feet each week!
It’s good to see my old employer, VNU eMedia, get into the world of weblogs, and with the right people involved. VNU has launched a pair of blogs, one for Billboard and one for Adweek, in an attempt to reach a larger, younger audience. (Given Billboard’s circulation woesâdown from a rate-card quote of 32,323 to a New York Times-noted 20,000 and changeâit couldn’t happen soon enough.)
The blogs themselves are hosted on blogs.com and run by outsiders with, I’d imagine, heavy oversight from the appropriate editorial staff.
Billboard PostPlay has potential. It’s staffed in part by the journalists at paidcontent.org, and Rafat Ali’s team is solid. But would someone please tell Billboard’s graphic designer to come up with a more sophisticated PostPlay logo? This one screams 1996, and it’s poorly optimized, too. Not the best way to make an impact online. Speaking of which, could someone at Billboard set up a server-side redirect so the home page actually works?
AdFreak seems to be a midpoint between Adweek magazine and, say, Gawker. Given the VNU copyright in the footer, this is an official site, but the logo and lack of a masthead makes it feel like a parody, or a foil to the similarly good-but-underwhelming AdRants. I kind of like the content, but chalk this one up as a work in progress.
Keep an eye on these blogs, and watch for the magazines’ evolution as well. Billboard’s new print redesign promises an interesting evolution, one that I hope my old friend Ken Schlager, now Billboard’s co-executive editor, will turn into an unqualified success.