The decline and fall of media standards continues. The New York Times is bringing in the money with Trump fake news that panders to the left. But at the cost of destroying its standards.
Working for the ole gray lady is not a fun job.
As one editor put it, “The mood at the paper is poisonous in a way I’ve never seen it in the past 15 years.” The ostensible reason is that the Times is undergoing yet another round of buyouts, set to be finalized on Thursday. “Every buyout is tense,” the editor continued, “but there’s something really demoralizing about this one that’s been worse than any before.”...
Additionally, the Times’s midtown Manhattan headquarters is itself being upended, shrinking by eight floors and leaving all but the highest of editors without private offices.
Class has its privileges.
But the Times is continuing its long march to become an online publication with an old brand. That means getting rid of more and more office personnel. And especially the copy desk. Because who cares about facts or style anymore.
In the reorganization, the copy desk is being eliminated as a freestanding entity. A smaller number of copy editors will be absorbed by different departments such as culture, metro, sports, etc. The Times’s 109 copy editors were invited to re-apply for jobs under the new system, and those who didn’t make the cut were encouraged to apply for buyout packages that also were offered to reporters and other editors. “Our goal with these changes is to still have more than one set of eyes on a story, but not three or four,” Baquet wrote in a Q&A with readers earlier this month. “We have to streamline that system and move faster in the digital age.” (Despite the dozens of positions that are being eliminated, the paper’s headcount of around 1,300 won’t change much. The money saved will be used to create 100 new positions for reporters and visual journalists. Investigative reporters will be a priority, according to the Times.)
Fewer copy editors, but more "investigative journalists" to pump out fake news hit pieces.
Not that it really matters. The Times has a terrible track record of acknowledging its fake news problem. CNN did a better job when the Timesian it hired to go after the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory had to resign. He would have stayed on at the Times.
But all this is telling of the descent of the media. The old standards don't matter much. Infotainment and lefty conspiracy theories are where it's at. And that's where the Times is at.
The streamlined system has been given the somewhat Orwellian-sounding designation of “strong editing,” in which “strong editors” will be the chief cooks and bottle-washers, responsible for every aspect of an article from structure to social-media presentation. Essentially, it’s a New York Times version of the editing process that has evolved at most Web-first news organizations, where editors have to be jacks-of-all-trades. For the Times,however, it’s a complex and nuanced shift. Someone intimately acquainted with the process boiled it down for me like this: in the old model, each story got two-and-a-half edits; in the new model, each story gets one-and-a-half edits, with more emphasis on a story’s digital presentation as opposed to its placement in the print edition.
The overall goal is the social media sell. The actual quality doesn't really matter. Welcome to the new media.