Surly 'Times' Readers Not Down With The Kids' Music
Among the pissing and moaning in the wake of new Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt's gentle suggestion that the paper might want to cover the saga of the Sulzberger family and its struggle to maintain control of the paper, reader Daniel Waitzman sends a missive that we think encapsulates the mindset of a huge swath of the paper's demographic. An excerpt:
[O]ver the space of a little more than a generation, do the following: Shrink the physical footprint of the newspaper and its tabloid-sized sections (the Book Review and New York Times Magazine). Reduce the number of columns from eight to six. Downgrade the intellectual level of the newspaper as a whole. Degrade the quality of writing, so that it is uneven and unworthy of the newspaper's heritage. Destroy the excellence of the Sunday Arts and Leisure by embracing a puerile "multiculturalism" and declaring that classical music and pop music are equivalent in artistic and spiritual significance.