Tagged: New York Times

Pour One Out for the TV Listings in the New York Times

This is the final TV listings ever printed in the New York Times.

Over the summer, I swapped my subscription to The New York Times from a digital-only to an old-fashioned home-delivery print subscription. One day, my neighbor picked up a copy and was amazed that the TV listings were still printed every day.

In yesterday’s print edition, the Times announced that it would stop printing TV listings, something the paper has printed since 1939. The reasons for discontinuing the listings are obvious to anyone today: most everyone I know watches TV asynchronously. We don’t need to know what’s on TV tonight any more than we need the paper to find a job, a used car, or a secondhand couch. Also, this gives the Times more space to write about—not simply list—television programming, of which there is more than ever.

Today, in the Sunday, August 30, edition of the Times, we see the final run for tonight’s TV listings. Curiously, today’s listings were printed in the Metropolitan section, which home subscribers like me received yesterday, as part of the Saturday delivery. It is perhaps one of the most succinct—albeit unintentional—messages that speaks to the anachronous nature of timely news still being delivered in print in 2020.

It’s 2020, and I Again Started Getting the Newspaper Delivered at Home

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Earlier this month, I did something rather unusual for 2020: I switched my subscription to the New York Times from a digital subscription to an old-fashioned home-delivery print edition.

I have had a subscription to the New York Times, in some one form or another, for as long as I can remember, even before I moved to city in 2001. While still living in Santa Barbara in the late 1990s and at the urging of one of my college professors, I subscribed to the New York Times at the same time I was receiving home delivery of the Los Angeles Times. Let’s just say that my recycling bins were never so full as they were during that era. I continued the subscription when I moved to New York, and it followed me from one apartment to another. Finally, in 2010, while living in Long Island City, I frustratingly gazed at my overflowing paper-recycling bin and decided that my print-news era was over. I switched to a digital subscription.

Yet in 2020, when almost every aspect of my life exists in “cyberspace,” I decided to restart home delivery of the print edition. Let this sink in: I am now paying someone to bring over many sheets of paper to my home just so I can get the news, as if there was no other way to get it.

Here are some reasons why I switched to home delivery of the print edition:

  • Over the summer, I often go to the beach and prefer to read the news in print. I can’t read my phone or tablet under the bright, hot sun.
  • No stores in my East Williamsburg–Bushwick neighborhood carry the New York Times anymore. Only a handful of bodegas even sell newspapers, but those few only carry the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and/or a Spanish-language daily.
  • I have access to a 50%-off academic rate, otherwise this would be completely unaffordable.
  • It comes with two bonus digital subscriptions. I gave one to my dad and another to a bartender in the neighborhood who used to do the crossword everyday until “all this happened.”
  • It’s a much more pleasant and focused experience to read the news in print than it is to drink from the proverbial firehose that is getting news online, especially on social media and especially in “these times.”
  • I had money in my Subscriptions budget after cancelling my AT&T TV Now “skinny bundle.” I soured on the package once it had swelled from an affordable $10/month package in 2016 to a bloated $35/month, including subsidies for the right-wing news outlets as One American News Network and Fox News.

Earlier today, after a month of receiving the paper on Saturdays and Sundays, I upgraded the subscription from weekends-only to seven-day delivery because I have enjoyed reading news in print so much. Also, in the age of the virus, where I don’t have to leave my apartment for work anymore, going downstairs to fetch the paper every morning seems like a nice healthy ritual.

All I need now is just a bigger recycling bin.

Today’s Branded Podcasts Are the In-House Radio Stations of the 1920s

In a widely circulated article in the New York Times, David Yaffe-Bellany writes about major companies releasing branded podcasts as a promotional and public-relations tool.

With podcasts rising in popularity, it’s no surprise that companies are producing their own. What’s more surprising is that people are actually listening to them.

Yaffe-Bellany estimates that there are about 750,000 podcasts available on the Internet, and I would argue that the large number is because podcasting has remained an open platform. The podcasting medium is not dominated by a single or a small group of companies, or at least not yet.

The phenomenon reminds me of something I remember reading about early radio broadcasting. Before it was centralized by the Federal Radio Commission—the predecessor of the FCC, schools, department stores, churches, and small communities operated radio stations into the 1920s. Chronologically, this was more or less between the amateur period of the 1910s and when the Commerce Department began classifying radio stations—Class A, Class B, and amateur stations—and prioritizing the large professionals, such as those stations run by AT&T, Westinghouse, and General Electric.

The amateurs were pushed out because they were deemed unprofessional and unpolished. Radio was a fairly open medium 100 years ago in the United States would later be dominated by as few as two radio commercial networks—NBC and CBS—and a handful of radio set manufacturers.

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The Day the Aura Burned

In an elegantly written feature about the 2008 fire at Universal City that burned virtually all of Universal Music Group’s recorded masters, we see a quoted reference to Walter Benjamin.

Jody Rosen writes about the value of a master recording:

The master contains the record’s details in their purest form: the grain of a singer’s voice, the timbres of instruments, the ambience of the studio. It holds the ineffable essence that can only truly be apprehended when you encounter a work of art up-close and unmediated, or as up-close and unmediated as the peculiar medium of recorded sound permits. “You don’t have to be Walter Benjamin to understand that there’s a big difference between a painting and a photograph of that painting,” [Andy Zax, a Grammy-nominated producer and writer who works on reissued recordings], said in his conference speech. “It’s exactly the same with sound recordings.”

Of course, I have students in my media criticism class read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” each semester. And though they groan and complain, this passing reference to Benjamin’s hallmark essay reaffirms my decision to assign it.

If nothing else, it allows me to teach students the precise meaning of words in an essay that is different from their colloquial understanding. Case in point: aura.

How I Use Less Plastic at Work

One way to reduce plastic—and paper—waste is to bring your coffee cup, such as the KeepCup.

A couple of weeks ago, the Climate:Fwd newsletter from the New York Times posted reader Jasmyn Trent’s tips for using less plastic at work. The tips were sensible and, for a lot of people, I presume that these could be pretty easy to implement.

The tips included bringing a set of reusable utensils to keep at your work space, bringing a spoon/stirrer and a mug for your cups of coffee, keeping a tote bag around for shopping trips made during the workday, and getting a reusable water bottle to avoid using water bottles.

Not only did I find her suggestions useful, I noticed that I already have adopted the majority of her recommendations.

Like her, I work at an office that allows me to easily adopt these tips. Although I do the majority of my work at home, I do work at an office a couple of days a week. This office has a refrigerator and microwave oven, making it easy for me to bring in my lunch. It also has a kitchen sink where I can easily wash out my utensils and dishes.

Since I had already been exercising these recommendations, I wanted to share the tools I used for not only using less plastic but also for generating less trash.

TOAKS Titanium Spork

Ms. Trent’s suggestions to bring from home a set of utensils is a good one. I have been using this spork as an two-in-one utensil for my lunches since 2014. It’s great because it works for most any kind of food that requires a fork or spoon. That’s why they call it a spork, right?

KeepCup Reusable Coffee Cup

The ur-cup for the fussy coffee hipster crowd. I have had one of these since 2014, and I don’t know how I haven’t yet broken it. The price is a bit steep—a 12-ounce cup costs about $20, but it’s outlasted all the less expensive thermal mugs I’ve bought over the years. However, unlike most thermal mugs that vacuum seal, you can’t throw this cup into a bag and it not spill. Curiously, on more than one occasion, when I’ve brought the cup to a coffee shop for some drip coffee, it was on the house.

Lifefactory 16-Ounce Glass Water Bottle

This too can seem expensive at first but compared to all the other water bottles I’ve bought and used over the years, this one has outlasted all of them. Of course, the different materials for bottles have different advantages and disadvantages. A glass bottle is both heavy and likely to break, compared to plastic and metal. These bottles come with a silicon sleeve that has protected the bottle from breaking when I’ve dropped it. By far the biggest advantage is that it won’t change the taste of your water and you can wash it forever. As long as you don’t break the bottle, it’s one that you won’t have to throw out. I can’t say the same about all those plastic and metal water bottles of the past.

Tom Bihn Synapse Backpack

Tom Bihn sells dedicated grocery bags, but since I regularly travel with a backpack, I just stash my purchases in my backpack.

I noticed that a lot of these items are pretty expensive. A $200 backpack, a $20 water bottle and coffee cup, and a $10 spork seem indulgent. But remember that the aim here is to reuse things, and I find it harder to throw away things that were costly, especially if I find them useful on a regular basis.

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MoviePass and The “Robin Hood” Economy

Kevin Roose wrote in the New York Times about something that I pointed out a while ago, albeit from the perspective of the consumer. It’s a good time to take advantage of companies swimming in venture capital money to subsidize your life.

Roose notes, albeit hyperbolically, that the “entire economy” works like MoviePass. In that model, you pay a small monthly fee and get to watch a movie at a movie theater, once a day. It’s a great deal if you’re a consumer. But what seems different about MoviePass than other companies is that seemingly everybody scrutinized that business model. “How are they going to make money?,” is a question that I often get whenever I try to refer people to MoviePass. (Sign up through this link, and MoviePass gets a little more unprofitable because you’ll get a free month of movies.)

Roose correctly tells us that simple arithmetic dictates that at one time, “in order to survive, businesses had to sell goods or services above cost.” MoviePass—or any other company—can’t survive much less thrive by selling products below cost forever. But what Roose misses is that this is not unique to our era. The price-over-cost model is not, as Roose writes, “so 20th century.” We saw companies giving things away in exchange for user growth in the dot-com era. I reminisced about the dot-com era when I was writing about the online wholesale vendor Boxed.

Back in the late 1990s, there were a bunch of dot-com companies that were basically giving away the store in order to show sales growth. [Boxed] seems like one of those: a startup outfit that’s trying to rack up sales, even at a loss, to show their investors that they should keep investing.

Indeed, Roose explains why so there are so many unprofitable companies. He explains:

The rise in unprofitable companies is partly the result of growth in the technology and biotech sectors, where companies tend to lose money for years as they spend on customer acquisition and research and development, Mr. Ritter said. But it also reflects the willingness of shareholders and deep-pocketed private investors to keep fast-growing upstarts afloat long enough to conquer a potential “winner-take-all” market. You should take advantage and stock up on toilet paper before the bubble bursts.

This is like Robin Hood giving us free stuff at the expense of rich venture capital firms. We as consumers should take advantage of that, and I’m sure millions of us have. Have you sign up for a meal kit service and had cheap meals delivered to your home? And after you burned through the sign-up credit, did you sign up with another meal kit service? Great. Keep that up, and don’t forget to get one for your dog, too.

Roose sounds alarmist about the impending doom that will befall an economy that is so heavily based on future user growth. He’s right. This can’t keep up forever. As we’ve seen multiple times in our lives, after all, bubbles like these burst. And the bigger it gets, the more spectacular the crash will be.

In the meantime, it’s a party for us consumers. Even Roose scored a deal through, Beepi, the defunct used car marketplace that shut down two years ago. He revels that the company lasted long enough for him to buy “a car through the service for thousands of dollars less than its market value. Thanks, venture capitalists!” I’m with him on this one. Let the rich VC douchebags fund our movies, our meals, our pet’s meals, and our bulk toilet paper purchases. This won’t last forever so stock up and sign up for every money losing service you can.

And don’t forget to sign up through your friends’ referral links. They deserve more free stuff, too!

Update: There is of course one glaring exception to this model. That is Uber and the “ridesharing” industry. Last year, Uber lost $4.5 billion dollars subsidizing cheap rides for users, but unlike other startups here, it also depressed the wages of its drivers. For those who depend on these wages for their livelihoods, it can lead to tragic outcomes.

Et Tu, Manjoo

It’s the Ides of March (BEWARE!), and over the last week, it’s come out that Farhad Manjoo’s two-months of only getting his news from print, which I discussed last week on this site, might not have quite the digital diet he led us to believe. In his column, Manjoo indicates that he “unplugged from Twitter,” but as Dan Mitchell and Joshua Benton reported since the column’s publishing, he was very active on Twitter.

Mitchell writing in the Columbia Journalism Review more or less deems Manjoo as a Twitter addict-in-denial:

It seems likely that Manjoo isn’t lying, and that he really believes he had unplugged, and really believes that his weak-sauce explanations don’t belie the point of his column. It could be that Manjoo’s column really does serve as a warning about the pernicious effects of social media. Just not in the way he meant it.

The Neiman Lab’s Joshua Benton digs into Manjoo’s activity on Twitter, using the Twitter API and with some hacky data visualization, as Benton himself admits, learns a few things:

  1. Manjoo did use Twitter less during his “diet” period, beginning in mid-January.
  2. During Manjoo’s two-month print news diet, Manjoo posts from Nuzzel, a news curation tool for Twitter. Nuzzel might have allowed Manjoo to “slow jam the news,” as he describes the purpose of his experiment. However, Benton describes Nuzzel as “a nicotine patch,” reinforcing the notion that Manjoo acts like an addict-in-denial.
  3. Benton notes that Manjoo didn’t just post and repost article from Twitter, but he also liked a lot of other people’s posts. This suggests that Manjoo was spending a lot of time scrolling through his Twitter feed.

In all, Benton concludes that “to say Manjoo ‘unplugged from Twitter’ really isn’t accurate.”

Bob Garfield, on WNYC’s On the Media, called out Manjoo’s claim that he “unplugged from Twitter.” In a special episode podcast episode released this week, Garfield says, “Farhad spent most of his 48-day diet sneaking into the fridge. In the time that he was supposedly “unplugged” from Twitter news, he had tweeted hundreds and hundreds of times. Not the crime of the century — but still, oops.”

Garfield interviews Manjoo, and it’s certainly awkward hearing Manjoo offer qualifications and exceptions to what he meant by being “unplugged.” Garfield appears unmoved, unconvinced, and even disappointed in Manjoo.

Of course, while using Twitter is not a crime and from what we know, he did really “slow jam the news” by subscribing to print newspapers and magazines, reading books, listening to podcasts and subscribing to newsletters, Manjoo undercut his credibility by continuing to use Twitter during this period. There was one line that really spoke to me and respect his noble experiment. At the end of his column, Manjoo reassures his readers that “you don’t have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook.”

Manjoo, who is well-educated and an experienced journalist, should have heeded his own advice… for at least for a couple of months.

Farhad Manjoo’s Junk-Free, Two-Month Print-News Cleanse

The tech columnist at the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo, spent the first two months of 2018 only getting his news from print sources. The experiment seems a bit counter intuitive to what a technology reporter should do. Why would someone surrounded by high-tech gadgets want to get his news in this low-tech, antiquated way?

The experiment seems to have yielded two conclusions. The first, which he readily acknowledges, is that it allowed him to get news at a slower rate, or “slow jam the news,” as he calls it. This allowed him to spend his time doing other things, rather than react to each news alert and post on social media. The results, he admits were quite dramatic: “I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.”

This is a common theme in the discourse of “being disconnected” from our digital devices. Disconnecting, the thinking goes, will allow us to live life at a more human (and humane?) pace, one more naturally attuned to our physiology and our psychology. Perhaps, there is a truth to that, but we humans are quite adaptable. These same arguments were made when newspapers were around: “how can anyone process so much news that fast?” Today, we make those same arguments to digital news.

The second conclusion he reaches is that he now gets higher-quality news. His new print-only news diet directed him to “looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.” He lists New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the weekly newsmagazine, The Economist as the ones he chose to subscribe to and read regularly. The result was that he felt better informed.

I don’t doubt that Manjoo is getting better news through these sources, but it’s not their print-first format that makes them so reputable: it’s the professional journalists who write for them. Being a journalist is like being a physician in that both professions train intensively and are both committed to the truth. A journalist learns methods for investigating and adheres to practices to present information in a responsible way, not unlike the physician’s long program of study prepares her to follow a proper course of treatment and adhere to a patient’s well-being.

Perhaps, it’s no coincidence that the Internet and born-digital “news” outlets have brought us so much junk news (or “fake news,” in the parlance of our times) over the years, as well as the junk science that feeds the anti-vaxxers and the anti-medicine crowd. The barriers of entry to start propagandistic and fraudulent websites are pretty low. In a way, this is why digital news is so polluted. Those who start and write for these junk news and junk science sites are usually the same know-nothings that rail against professional journalism (derisively calling it “fake news” or the “mainstream media”) and also against medicine. And don’t get me started on the anti-scientific bozos who drink “raw water,” or where Louis Pasteur meets Charles Darwin.

Social media has only amplified and expanded the reach of these junk dealers. Manjoo concludes, “you don’t have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook.” That is because, as we have seen, social media treats all “news” the same, and that has helped spark the disinformation that we’ve seen over the last twenty years. But that is not to say that the news a print journalist reports can’t be shared responsibly online.

And vice-versa: print is not immune to disinformation. As early as the nineteenth century, we had all kinds of salacious news, hoaxes, and outright frauds printed in newspapers. It took newspaper publishers a lot of soul searching and the field of journalism to establish professional training programs to make print the gold-standard of news and information.

Update: Apparently Manjoo couldn’t lay off the Twitter, much in the same way I can’t lay off those buttery Tate’s cookies.

It Turns Out: Banana Peels Were Actually Dangerous

We’re all familiar with the old cartoons or old movies where a character slips on a banana peel and comes crashing down to the ground. But has anyone you know actually slipped on a banana peel and fallen? Probably not.

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But it turns out that banana peels were in fact dangerous, especially in the large cities of the East Coast at the turn of the twentieth century. Annie Correal, writing for the New York Times, profiles the secret life of the city banana and notes how their popularity over a hundred years ago also made them dangerous.

They were so plentiful that in some cities, peels became a hazard. Yes, seriously. People fell and were injured. At least one man actually died from slipping on a banana peel. A headline in The New York Times in 1896 declared a “War on the Banana Skin.”

The 1896 article recounts how, Theodore Roosevelt, then-president of the city’s police department, “explained the bad habits of the banana skin, dwelling particularly on its tendency to toss people into the air and bring them down with terrific force on the hard pavement.” Roosevelt charged the police precinct supervisors to crack down on fruit and vegetable dealers from dumping “banana peels, apple and potato skins, and similar articles” on the lower eastside streets where many markets were prevalent.

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Slipping on a banana peel was so common at these markets that it must have made an impression on Jewish immigrants who populated Manhattan’s Lower East Side. According to Correal, “the notion of slipping on a banana peel made its way into American culture, [Dan] Koeppel said, thanks to Yiddish theater, Vaudeville and, eventually, silent films.”1 From there, it was just a matter of time that it became a common trope in TV programs since then.

I knew I hated bananas for a reason.

  1. Dan Koeppel is author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World (2008). <p class=”text-muted”>This link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something through those link, I will earn a commission fee,</p> ↩

New York City 2017 Bike Map Pays Tribute to Bill Cunningham

I finally had a chance to see the New York City 2017 Bike Map, and it took me a while to realize that the cover pays tribute to longtime New York Times fashion photographer and cultural icon Bill Cunningham. Cunningham was a well known bicycle enthusiast and was known to enjoy riding his bike to photograph New York street life in his weekly “On the Street” columns for the New York Times.

Film still from Bill Cunningham New York. First Thought Films/Zeitgeist Films.

There are a few giveaways that show the cover illustration depicts Cunningham:

  • it’s an older, white-haired man on cruiser,
  • he’s snapping a photo from his bike,
  • he’s wearing his trademark blue jacket and grey pants,
  • most obviously, the map indicates a credit of “Cover illustration of Bill Cunningham, used with permission of the Estate of William J. Cunningham.”

Bill Cunningham passed away at age 87 a year ago today. He was extensively covered in the 2010 documentary, Bill Cunningham New York, which as of today, is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

NYC Bike Map 2017 Inset Pays Tribute to Bill Cunningham