The New York Times Is So Over Blogs, Killing Them Off One By One
R.I.P. blogs, we hardly knew ye.
The New York Times’ City Room blog announced on Monday that it was shutting down, retiring to the dusty and poorly-designed corner of the internet where all blogs go to die.
“So City Room, per se, goes away,” said Wendell Jamieson, the Metro editor of The Times and a former editor of City Room, said as part of the blog’s last post. “But all the benefits, all the sense of speed and fun and smarts — those will live on in new forms as we move through the digital, social age.”
Like the racially-insensitive children’s rhyme about syphilis, “Ten Little Indians,” the newspaper’s blogs are dropping one by one. The post notes that the Times currently has about 20 active blogs — down from the 80 it once ran (it also used the word “blogmaniacal” to explain that). Among the fallen are the highly-acclaimed Green blog, its breaking news blog The Lede, the New Old Age blog about aging, and dozens more.
In a 96-page report detailing the company’s plan for “innovation” that was leaked last year, editors wrote that “our blog platforms helped train an entire generation of Times reporters and editors to write for the web.”
Now, it seems the Times is going back on that thought. Rumor has it, though, that someone on the arts desk is working on a 12,000-word 3D interactive feature with the headline, “The Blog Is Dead.”
