A bit on the non-food tip before the nose-to-tail adventure commences. You may have seen the fake NY Post response to those Times Weekender TV advertisements. Pretty funny, but living in a market where the Times Weekender ads don't run much, I took a look at the actual Times Weekender ad:
Separately and together, what the real and the fake advertisements suggest about the future of newspapers -- and the present of New York City -- is kind of alarming. In no particular order:
-As someone who spends time in his day job thinking about print culture, it appears that the shared presumption of the real and the fake ad is that the primary function of the print newspaper in 2010 is to help identify suitable mates. Back in the day, the Boston Globe was known as "The Maid's Paper," as distinct from the Boston Evening Transcript of T.S. Eliot fame, and it's nice to know that in multi newspaper towns, the paper still serves this function as a social filter.
-More generally, do these ads share a presumption that the Times demo skews smarter and whiter, and the Post's skews dumber and browner? I say that despite/because of the spokesmodels in the Times ad -- by virtue of looking like somebody's idea of what architects look like, they suggest that they are more united by their designer eyewear than they are divided by the colors of their skin. Add in the white members of the lumpenproletariat in the fake Post ad, and maybe, instead the conclusion is that we are living in a world where class trumps race? In which case, yay?
-The premise of the Weekender makes me kind of sad, on both the supply and demand side. The Times is saying "Hey, I know we can't ask you to make a real commitment, but maybe we can, like, hook up on the weekends?" The reader is saying "K! I'm too busy to keep up with, like, the Swat Valley and the collapse of the economy, but maybe three days worth of soft news will be kinda like the cultural equivalent of the Today Sponge, and keep me conversationally viable on the jitney." Not to mention that the notion of being "fluent" in a given section makes me want to run screaming in the direction of a big book of Sudoku.
Holy crap. They're pandering to 20somethings while dissing them in the magazine?
Brill analysis! (That's Twitterspeak courtesy of Obamafoodorama.)
Posted by: gastropoda | Monday, 23 August 2010 at 08:25 PM
They are only out to get your dime (now $'s). When the NYT's goes behind a firewall this fall, the obit feed will die too. Thanks for the Post laughs.
Posted by: Marco | Tuesday, 24 August 2010 at 08:52 AM