I opened Facebook this morning for a quick rant about the FOURTH SNOW DAY THIS MONTH. Ugh. I’m hating life.
In the midst of the flurry of pro-Snow Day status updates and anti-Snow Day status updates, there were several references to this article in the New York Observer about NYT staffers who hate the opinion page. (And thanks to Amy P for the email heads-up.)
I used to have daily reactions on the blog to opinion pieces in the New York Times. Their columnists jump started many great discussions in the blogosphere. That hasn’t happened in a really long time. In part, because they’ve gotten stale. Also, there are many, many places to get branded opinions these days; the playground is a lot bigger.
I’m not sure why the Times or any paper has permanent opinion columnists. It’s probably a good idea to take the job as a year-long gig.
Apt. 11d 
We only had a two hour dealy.
Anyway, I’ve mostly stopped reading the NYT and switched to The Atlantic. I started reading there with your sidebar and now that they have The Wire, you can get breaking events.
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Laura said:
“I’m not sure why the Times or any paper has permanent opinion columnists. It’s probably a good idea to take the job as a year-long gig.”
That is a very good idea. Just about any writer has a year’s worth of decent opinion columns in them. Being on the NYT opinion page could then be a career-starter, rather than a funeral wreath on your career.
By the way, the nepotism at the NYT (and in the media world generally) is just amazing. There are so many examples where people half or a quarter a talented as their fathers get jobs that their fathers never could have gotten at the same age. (Andrew Rosenthal is the NYT editorial page writer that the NYT reporters are revolting against. He is also the son of the legendary A.M. Rosenthal, Pulitzer Prize winner and NYT executive editor.)
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I agree that permanent opinion columnists should be eliminated. It made sense (maybe) that, in a society with a unified and permanent Establishment, one element of that Establishment should be a set of eminences grises, like Anthony Lewis, who channelled the thoughts of the political and judicial elite to the commercial and financial elitem, or like Tom Wicker, who could speak to the progressive elements of the white South as one of them, and reconcile them to national changes. But we have no such Establishment any more (and they didn’t do that great a job when we did have them). We have a very diverse and individualistic country, and there isn’t any reason to anoint a small set of writers to be the voice of the paper of record.
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Speaking of nepotism, there’s a fascinating article on a new book, the Son also rises: surnames and the history of social mobility in the New Republic. The book isn’t out yet, but the article says that wealth lasts for 10-15 generations, and that this stat hasn’t changed in 100’s of years. The author uses surnames to track social status — as an example, an english person who shares a last name with someone listed in the doomsday book (1086) has a 25% higher chance of being at Oxbridge (note the misuse of percents there).
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116462/family-wealth-lasts-ten-fifteen-generations
(It’s really hard not to plagiarize well written articles)
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I’ll try to read the book when it comes out. On the basis of the interview, though, I don’t think it’s very reliable. Using surnames is not the same as tracing lines of descent. The whole point of primogenture was to preserve family wealth. A name in the Domesday book doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the same family–and if you could trace all descendants, you might come up with a radically different picture of overall family status.
After all, if you go back 1,000 years, (some 30 generations), (the Domesday book era), all Europeans descend from the same set of ancestors: http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/3770411-europeans-we-re-all-kissing-cousins
Their calculations show that two Europeans of two neighbouring countries have between two and twelve common “genetic” ancestors who lived over the past 1,500 years, and up to a hundred if the hunt goes back another thousand years.
As surprising as it may seem, all the inhabitants of Europe who lived a thousand years ago and who left descendants are themselves the ancestors of all of today’s Europeans. Or if you prefer, all contemporary Europeans descend from the same set of ancestors who lived a thousand years ago.
I suspect looking at status markers at two points of time exaggerate social standing, as most people are not represented on such lists. The successful are remembered; the unsuccessful disappear from the records.
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Pinch has taken the paper from a value of $8 billion to a value of $1 billion in his stewardship. The many Ochs/Sulzberger descendants for whom their share was a wonderful top-up for their moderate to good incomes have to be unhappy, while Pinch pays himself and his buddies large salaries. The Bancroft family sold WSJ while the selling was good – looking at that lost opportunity has to bite. It’s not just the reporters who are unhappy!
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