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Topic: When did NYTimes Mag start going downhill?
| Author | Message |
| snuffleupagus | Posted – 3/16/2008 1:16:44 PM | show profile I used to look forward to the magazine's clever and well-written features every Sunday, but now it seems like that interesting feature pops up about once per year. Their columns rarely compare to what you can find any day of the week on Slate. And a lot the the mag's content is written by experts -- profs, lawyers, and so forth -- rather than journalists, and it's frankly quite boring. With the exception of some really boring personal essays, they've completely eschewed narrative. |
| seeattleme | Posted – 3/16/2008 4:49:35 PM | show profile You are so right! This is so true! Probably the "T" NY Times STyle magazine influence. I used to read NY Times mag cover to cover, Now I can usually get through one or two stories--including Deborah Solomon's column--and maybe The Ethicist. Sad. Sad sad sad. |
| Suet | Posted – 3/17/2008 10:54:27 AM | show profile Two things I find irksome but may be peripheral to your concerns: 1. They got rid of the paragraph summarizing the letters to the editor, which helped give a sense of community. 2. The horrible fashion spreads - they got called out a few weeks ago for having models that looked particularly sickly/anorexic/suicidal. Horrible stuff, and also a reflection of our times. |
| Suet | Posted – 3/17/2008 10:57:50 AM | show profile Two things I find irksome but may be peripheral to your concerns: 1. They got rid of the paragraph summarizing the letters to the editor, which helped give a sense of community. 2. The horrible fashion spreads - they got called out a few weeks ago for having models that looked particularly sickly/anorexic/suicidal. Horrible stuff, and also a reflection of our times. |
| snuffleupagus | Posted – 3/17/2008 11:26:51 AM | show profile The strangest thing about their decline is I that their contributors are some of the best journalists working today. I've got a soft spot for their science stories, and I always look forward to the latest piece by Michael Pollan or D.T. Max or Jim Holt. But enterprise reporting is not showing up in the mag -- just half-baked think pieces. |
| seeattleme | Posted – 3/17/2008 3:20:06 PM | show profile You can't keep using the same journalists. You need to go out and find new fresh talent to keep a publication thriving. The same tired voices eventually become the same tired lazy voices. NY Times used to do this: With the Hers and About Men column, with Lives, with cover stories written about people and places and situations--by writers--from all over the country. Now it's just one big Manhattan fart fest. |
| Metro Writer | Posted – 3/17/2008 5:34:00 PM | show profile The regional sections (Westchester, Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut) are now one and it's gone downhill, too. TPTB have no clue what readers want: news that means something to them. That's the same issue with local papers that have so many wire stories. TPTB think they're going to be more profitable by cutting back staff, but the content suffers. They boast that newspaper readers are more educated and affluent. Guess what? They can figure out what's going on! |
| Team America | Posted – 3/17/2008 7:30:07 PM | show profile You folks may be more devoted to NYTM than I am and so may have higher standards for affection... although I will speak up for them in one regard... I'm not a household name, but they took a chance and recently published me there... When I look at their output I remain impressed, especially when compared to the Sunday mags of other supposedly influential newspapers... that doesn't mean they aren't in a slump of course. But seriously, if you think NYTM is horrible, just for comparison take a look at The Boston Globe Magazine. |
| seeattleme | Posted – 3/17/2008 7:44:28 PM | show profile Good point, team America. And by any and all standards it still beats Parade... But treat yourself sometime and go to the library and skull up old issues from the late 80s and through the ninties. The last best story the NY Times magazine ever ran was the story the book "Beautiful Boy" was based on (in stores, and sadly, at Starbuck's--now). That was in 2005, I believe. Now if i read ONE MORE ARTICLE about Peggy Orenstein's issues with getting pregnant and/ or /(and "and", for that matter) raising her biracial child I will SCREAM. |
| Suet | Posted – 3/18/2008 11:33:40 AM | show profile Yeah the regional sections have lost a lot too. They just took out the letters to the editors. The profiles they ran say 15 to 10 years ago were great, it's just fluffier and fluffier and more and more irrelevant stuff nowadays. |
| a.s. | Posted – 3/18/2008 2:11:29 PM | show profile Does anyone know why they stopped running True Life Tales in the funny pages? It was definitely the only thing in the section that was ever worth reading. |
| RockinRonD | Posted – 3/25/2008 7:28:30 PM | show profile | email poster Decline of NYT Magazine As someone who worked at the NYT magazine in the mid 80's and edited one of their major bi-annual Part II sections under then EIC Ed Klein, I can tell you the magazine today is a mere shadow of what it once was. I actually wrote the About Men column regularly. Back then, there were great editors working there--major talent, from desk line editors to art directors and staff writers. Now the whole T Magazine and its mutant spinoffs is run by a non-American with no journalistic credentials who is neither a writer nor a real editor and whose resume can only brag a stint as fashion director of a national men's magazine (where he never actually wrote or edited anything and his pages were sorely lacking in ideas or worthwhile information). And he's probably making $200,000 + at the NYT. I weep for the future. |
| seeattleme | Posted – 3/25/2008 8:05:51 PM | show profile T magazine and it's been nominated for the national magazine award! Sad. Sad sad sad. It's all pictures, like a preK book. Nothing readable. Sad. Sad for the NY Times and sad for what the magazine industry considers its very best. |
