I'm old enough to have had the NYTimes delivered daily to my door and to especially savor Sundays when the paper arrived with all of its bulk and I knew that a good part of my day would be devoted to the Book Review and the Magazine and one of Will Shortz' crosswords, all while sipping many cups of coffee. And then the digital age happened...I get the NYTimes, as I do most everything I read, online. Digitized. And we all know the order of the day is different, as is the order of everything we read. No more beginning to end. We jump around. Like bees on flowers. There's another flower. And another.
How does a newspaper respond to this? That's the question the New York Times set out to explore and here is a link to their findings, as reported on Buzzfeed:
Exclusive: New York Times Internal Report Painted Dire Digital Picture
It's a tough business, no doubt. Amidst all of this turmoil, the NYTimes quite unceremoniously showed Jill Abramson the door. Mere readers will never know any, or all, of the machinations that went into the decision of tossing out the first female executive editor in NYTime's history, but I can say, most definitely, that the way it was done stinks to high heaven. They do want to assure everyone that her firing had nothing to do with gender discrimination or equal pay issues:
Times Seeks to Reassure its Staff After Abramson's Ouster - NYTimes
For the first time ever, I'm thinking of cancelling my subscription to the NYTimes.
For sheer genius, there is nothing better than this instagram photo of Jill Abramson posted by her daughter the day after the NYTimes tossed out the baby with the bathwater: