On Sunday, the food critic from the New York Times, Frank Bruni, wrote an article for the magazine section confessing to a life-long battle with his weight and his problem with bulimia. From Bruno, I learned that it is best to use two wet fingers to purge your burger and fries. Nice tip.
Bruno's confessional comes three months after Edmund Andrews, the finance reporter for the Times, confessed to bankruptcy and a year after David Carr, the business columnist for the Times, copped to a former crack habit.
Are reporter confessionals the new strategy for turning around the Times' flagging business?
What next? Maureen Dowd confesses that she's a high school dropout? David Brooks tell us that he has a thing for wearing women's shoes? Late at night, Nicholas Kristof dresses up as a large panda bear and goes to furry conventions?
Apt. 11d 
Plus it’s $6 for the Sunday now. For that, they should at least print comics.
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How refreshing — reporters now need to write like bloggers to earn legitimacy!
Touche’
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And now I can’t shake the mental image of Brooks wearing heals with a Senator’s hand on his thigh.
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MH,
Now that you mention it, Brooks already is part of the pattern of TMI that Laura mentioned in her post.
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Actually, what bothers me about the NYT most is what has always bothered me, Sunday Styles. As near as I can tell, it exists solely to encourage revolution.
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Hey, I didn’t know Bruni was also a Daily Tar Heel writer. Cool.
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MH: “Actually, what bothers me about the NYT most is what has always bothered me, Sunday Styles. As near as I can tell, it exists solely to encourage revolution. ”
Those stories about the plight of the under $1 million/year families don’t make you want to send them money? 🙂
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“How refreshing — reporters now need to write like bloggers to earn legitimacy!”
Well, some reporters started writing like bloggers way back in 1996 — e.g., the Boston Phoenix’s Caroline Knapp, author of the memoir Drinking: A Love Story.
That said, though, the Phoenix is an alternative paper, not the august paper of record that the NYT purports to be.
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There have been a couple of alcoholism books by journalists; in addition to Knapp’s book (which BTW was fabulous) I am thinking of Pete Hamill’s Drinking Life from 1995. It reminds me of a recent article I saw, noting that journalists as a profession drink more than anyone — even computer people and cops.
I actually don’t think this is a purposeful thing on the part of the NYT. I think their journalists are all getting their pay cut and seeing the writing on the wall, and working on book contracts. In an attempt to get some early publicity they pitch it at the office, which is also scrapping for cheap and easy content. And voila, the NYT is transformed into a long, time-delayed confessional.
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I think Jen has hit the motivation for the phenom on the head.
I was eeked out by the Bruni article, though. It really disturbed me that someone who celebrates food has a psychological problem with it. I know that the same argument could be made about the finance reporter, but I didn’t find his story nearly as disturbing. I suspect I understand food pathology better than money pathology (well, and believe that food pathology is more biologically based), especially in Bruni’s case, where it was lifelong, so that he was telling us about a sickness and an addition, unlike the finance reporter’s “mistake.” I couldn’t read the entire Bruni article.
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