The NY Times covered the PR profession this weekend (see Sunday business section, Your Publicist should Call my Publicist); or, more specifically, the world of Hollywood publicists, in an article that was clearly timed to coincide with the Oscar awards.
The reporter, Michael Cieply, said that there are now too many entertainment publicists:
This is an industry that still remembers the old MGM publicity department's way of cleaning up messes... But even here in Hollywood, recent growth in public relations machinery is cause for remark.
Executives have publicists. Stars have publicists. The tiniest movies will arrive with publicity teams, often three of four of them... Sometimes it seems, even publicists have publicists.
Could it be, perish the thought, that there so many because publicists provide an important and effective service (and why is the service referred to as "machinery"?)
Unfortunately the NY Times seems to be tied up in its own publicity mess following the ill-advised McCain piece - in which they implied that he had an affair - from last Thursday. The publication has been hammered incessantly - by the left, the right and everyone in between - since the article appeared.
But has anyone contemplated a world without the NY Times, the noble institution that is so often cited on the this blog?
None other than tech luminary Marc Andreessen has, as reported by Josh Quittner in the Fortune piece Marc Andreesen's newspaper deathwatch (and pointed out to me by my colleague Suzanne McGee).
What's the tech pioneer been doing since Netscape? Investing in social networks and waiting for the New York Times to die.
Quittner wrote, and continued:
When I mentioned its dismal earnings and casually suggested that one way to save the paper and the social good it provides ... would be for some rich guy to ride in and set up a trust to protect it, [Andreessen] blew a gasket. "My company does good for the world," he growled. "Why doesn't someone protect it?"
Then he went back to his computer and launched a kind of fatwa that was immediately broadcast in the echo chamber of the blogosphere.
"I can't take it anymore," he wrote on his blog (blog.pmarca.com). "I hereby inaugurate my New York Times Deathwatch, which will continue until the last Sulzberger has left the building." The piece goes on to rip apart the Times' business strategy top to bottom, attacking everything from the techno-illiteracy of its board of directors ... to its recent per-copy price hike. "When you have an obsolete, inconvenient physical product that nobody wants in an era of universal online access, the appropriate strategy is clearly to raise the price," he snarked.
And it wasn't even McCain that set Andreessen off.
I dunno, I guess they are an easy target but I really think you have to love the Times. They get it right more often than they get it wrong. True, they let their bias show sometimes, but what publication doesn't? Their commitment to news over the years - to good old fashioned reporting (OK, the words "old fashioned" might not help their case if you listen to Andreessen) and have worn thin more reporters' shoe leather in pursuit of the story than just about any other publication.
Even right wingers cite articles the NY Times when it supports their arguments, not just when they are hyperventilating over the unfairness of it.
I think we would all rue a day when we did not have the NY Times to kick around anymore.
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