"The lower end of the newspaper market"

Ha ha - you've obv. never seen our Times (the err.. London Times, I believe you call it). I remember when they first launched their 'upmarket' bingo in the 80s. It was called 'Portfolio'. And the middle classes went mad for it.

Bah, we were through this already and I said the reason I hate it is because McDonalds is bad for you, proven by science, fact.

ok, but i'm gonna read up on that properly now to see how it compares with other food in general (e.g. is it worse for you than a full fried English breakfast and if so how so?) and what these bad effects are

the more you know...

i still like the daily news, and i think newsday in its prime was a really solid tabloid (although recently it's been ripping more and more stories from its times-mirror bretheren, which is a bummer). and yes, i do think that the reporting on some local stories is better-handled by the tabloids. but i'm curious -- which articles did you see that had more than one reporter working on them? it seems to me like so many of the ones that do merit more than one reporter have a name attached to them and are more scandal than, say, reports on the economy and how it's affecting locals.

btw, i hope it doesn't come off like i'm defending the times as the paragon of journalism here -- i hardly think it's a perfect paper, and to be frank, its constant middlebrow positioning (esp. in its arts coverage) makes me want to throw it across the room at times. (amanda hesser must be stopped!)

so its an old argument and i guess we shouldnt get into it

And yeah, some of the arts coverage in the Times is kinda sketchy. (Hey Maura, did you read the big food piece today? 'I went to a -gasp- mainstream supermarket today and oh my god shock horror, they only had romaine lettuce! Where was the radicchio?' or whatevah)

i think i'm going to check out some issues of the post and the daily news just to see this imbalance. i do see your point about the times positioning itself as more of a national newspaper (much like the washington post, which i think benefits from having the government be its front and center local story, although they're getting crazy hawkish on the op-ed page), and i wish that they'd devote more space to covering all of the city instead of, i don't know, that dumb escapes section or their weekly piece on the strokes and the yeah yeah yeahs. but i think when they apply local-style reporting to issues in other parts of the country, they really shine.

It isn't shocking at all. 'You've obviously' was just a figure of speech. Sorry if I gave any other impression. Yes, I believe they do have similar things today, though in a less-sustained way. 'Pay off your mortgage' , 'Win a holiday home in France' kind of stuff. Maybe I'm wrong and it's just the Daily Mail and Evening Standard (midmarket) that run these things these days. I can't remember now.

(jess in being snot shocker.)

it seems to me - and maybe i'm wrong - that a lot of local-style broadsheets in the us have been adopting a more tabloid-y approach, although sufficiently whitewashed for their market.

(also does anyone read a newspaper for the editorials? in fact does anyone read the broadsheet editorials at all? i tend not to bother).

on tabloid vs broadsheet: tabloids tend to piss me off by not writing enough about anything, while broadsheets waste thousands of words on saying very little (it's an easy criticism to make, but sitting down and reading a weekend broadsheet cover to cover takes an entire day and imparts very little info for that investment). i can't really remember the days before 30 page second sections every day, but i can't help feeling that there must have been less filler articles back then. anyone who reads the G2 or equivalent every day and looks down on tabloid readers for reading about irrelevant pap is a fool.

also on the ny times' reliance on reuters etc: this is one of the things that always puts me off reading it (plus the layout - it looks like something out of the distant past! what is it with us newspapers looking so univiting compared to uk ones?). are uk newspapers any better? from memory i'd say "yes", but it could easily be that i haven't noticed/they're less good at crediting their sources. anyone?

oh, drat, marginalized again!

This is a sad story and a well articulated take on what happens when all you have left is social media.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/10/gannett-local-newspaper-hawk-eye-iowa/619847/