Newsweek reporter Seth Mnooking and the Village Voice's Syd Schanberg have been arguing over whether Schanberg implied at Mediabistro's "Future of the New York Times" panel that the NYT's ad-loaded lifestyle sections contributed to their recent problems. What was actually said, according to the transcript:
Seth Mnookin: If they need to do 10 new sections to keep the quality of their reporting, I'll support that. We live in a capitalist society, and they need to survive in a capitalist market. If they have five more crappy escape sections and can keep their A section as one of the best sources of news in the world, that's a tradeoff I'll make. I can just throw away the Escapes section. But if the A section disappears, there's no place else I can go to get that.
Syd Schanberg: Internally, though, that's part of the problem. The reader can control the extraneous stuff, you're right, but the inside of the paper... the publisher is wondering what the standards are. Because the standards for, say, the City Section and the Style Section, are different from the A section. Then you say, 'Well, what are the standards?' And those lifetime sections and advertising sections creep in and create confusion.
[Ed.I could jump in here and conveniently say that they're both implying that sappy service journalism is contributing to the demise of investigative reporting, buuuut I won't. I'll just imply that I could imply it.]
Let's go to the transcript [Romenesko]