Winter Rant

I was browsing an ebook store just now when I saw a book cover brandished with the “New York Times Bestseller” badge. I immediately developed a dislike for the book and wanted to move on to the next book as quickly as I could.

I have been thinking about those two visceral seconds and how the Times as a brand fueled my dislike of a book that I otherwise know nothing about.

I had been a digital subscriber of the Times for 13 years. I started reading it fifteen years ago when I was preparing for my GREs. The writing at The Times always stood out to me for its command of language and analysis of the topic at hand.

But in the face of economic realities — one faced by most newspapers in the West — and the pressures to turn a profit, NYTimes made a bargain to make more money, all to seem more like a blog or even TikTok.

The Times always had its biases. It painted India as an ultra-conservative Hindu country that did not care for its minorities (even before India became that). It was overtly critical of movies that were popular with audiences, but perhaps not in the running for the Oscars. It never took kindly to any strain of conservatism, even when it came from the Democratic Party in the US.

But those biases worked to an extent because the newspaper had this veneer of the scholarly. Its news articles were citable sources of objective reality. Finding grammatical or typographical errors in the writing was essentially an Olympic sport. The paper clearly stood for a liberal agenda, but it did so with so much gravitas, and with so much care for truth, news reporting and the written word.

Then it started its descent into digital media, which how I first accessed The Times. it did not merely offer a digital subscription. It built an in-house technology operation that rivaled small startups in Silicon Valley.

That is how we got the paywall on NYTimes.com, the election needle, the endless cartographical visualizations that augmented news stories. It even invested heavily into virtual reality content — I got a free Google Cardboard set from The Times. Arguably these were useful innovations for journalism.

But overtime, the front page of the NYTimes started resembling a microblog or a TikTok stream. Instead of appearing scholarly by reporting with detail and nuance, it opted for sound-bite journalism. It started looking a lot like the Huffington Post. There was no analysis or coverage of current affair. It seemed like the place where you would go for gossip.

I first turned to this paper because it could string full sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into cogent stories that not just reported the news with great detail but were also engaging. I turned to the paper because I wanted to learn how to write better.

But when that stopped happening… that is the writing gave way to snippets of running commentary on the day’s affairs, organized like a microblog, is how I lost trust in the paper of record.