Don’t Write Like the NYT
At first glance, I thought this was satire from The Onion or McSweeney’s:
Since this is a real thing, I want to state clearly for anyone aspiring to be a writer or (which is the case for many of us) for anyone currently being a writer and trying to continue our journey, don’t write like the NYT.
I am not being satirical, by the way, and I am not being hyperbolic.
The NYT provides an unmatched platform for their journalists and opinion columnists:
The New York Times (NYT) is an American daily newspaper, founded and continuously published in New York City since September 18, 1851. It has won 112 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization. Its website is one of America’s most popular news sites, and the most popular among all the nation’s newspapers, receiving more than 30 million unique visitors per month as reported in January 2011. The paper’s print version remains the largest local metropolitan newspaper in the United States and third-largest newspaper overall, behind The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Following industry trends, its weekday circulation has fallen to fewer than one million daily since 1990. Nicknamed The Gray Lady, The Times is long regarded within the industry as a national “newspaper of record”. It is owned by The New York Times Company. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., whose family has controlled the paper since 1896, is both the paper’s publisher and the company’s chairman. Its international version, formerly the International Herald Tribune, is now called the International New York Times. The paper’s motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page. Its website has adapted it to “All the News That’s Fit to Click”. It is organized into sections: News, Opinions, Business, Arts, Science, Sports, Style, Home, and Features. The New York Times stayed with the eight-column format for several years after most papers switched to six, and was one of the last newspapers to adopt color photography.
Yet, invariably, nearly daily, the NYT and its journalists badly mangle their public duty to report the news and offer high-quality and informed opinions from what can be argued as the loftiest perch in print/online newspapers in the U.S.
Being this big and this powerful, it seems, has simply allowed the NYT to be arrogant and incredibly lazy — even petty.
[Please continue reading HERE.]
