New York Times Plays Cheap and Shabby

If you go to the NYTimes website (http://www.nytimes.com) and spend a few minutes browsing the front page you may choose to look at an article, only to find that part of an ad flashes out and descends on the text you are trying to read. Is it distracting? No, it's downright frightening. It's more like having someone burst a paper bag in your face. A water-balloon whammy, is what it is.

For example MotorollaQ, whatever that means, has a blackberry that gives you the raspberries. A PDA swells up, hops out of the ad's frame, and descends on the article itself to virtually fill up the screen before you. Is this journalism? If it is, the NYTimes can look forward to an even shorter future than its managers anticipate.

I subscribe to a NYTimes special service called Times Select, in order to get at "restricted" OpEd pieces and Times columnists' offerings. It's too late for me. I spent my $49.95 to find out this year whether the service was worth that much money. I can plainly tell you that the NYTimes has not only violated good taste. It has also dropped its commitment to inform the public in non-sensational ways. They have, in short, gone crass. For a nickel or a dime.

As a result of this insult to the readership, I recommend not reading the NYTimes on the Web. Pick another paper till that one descends into bad taste too. Then pick another and another. Eventually some newspaper will make a stand (the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun?), and make a profit from it.

In the meantime, I wish the publisher of the NYTimes many sleepless nights, till he/she straightens out a tasteless, demeaning rag and restores it to the integrity the paper lost on its imagined way to bankruptcy court.