In his latest New York Magazine column, Kurt Andersen takes on everything from Dan Rather to bloggers and asserts his old media bona fides. We're not talking about his fond remembrance of his TIME Magazine-era Selectric typewriter and 6PM cocktail: we're talking about really old media:

Journalism is reverting to a very old-school status quo, when most coverage was as partisan as today s New York Post s. In the middle of the nineteenth century, New York City had a population of 500,000 but more than a dozen daily papers and countless weeklies, most of them small-scale, idiosyncratic reflections of their editors and owners, chockablock with summaries of stories nicked from other publications in other words, very bloglike.

Everything goes back to the the nineteenth century. (That is, until his book finally comes out.)

Andersen also has something smart to say about The New York Times' acquisition of About.com:

Around 20 million Americans still read a weekly newsmagazine. And the New York Times, of course, remains the New York Times, the presiding hegemon. (The newspaper, that is. The company s recent $410 million acquisition of About.com probably made irresistible ad-sales sense, but I find it staggering proof on the downside of the twentieth century s end that the New York fucking Times is attaching its imprimatur to a third-rate online almanac written by a herd of 500 amateurs.)

And here we thought Andersen was a fan of the amateur spirit.

Premodern America [NYM]