New York Times
Jason Kottke blows an opportunity to call bullshit on The New York Times Magazine section called Funny Pages. First of all, though, the idea of a section serialized comic and a novella, each from a illustrator-writer (Chris Ware) and writer (Elmore Leonard) who will spend a few months at a time and a column or story from a different author each week (see the editor's introduction for more information on the format) is a really great, prompting me to resubscribe to the magazine's RSS feed. I also have the "podcasts" queued up for a slow day, which weekends always are.
I put the word "podcasts" in quotes not because I don't like the term—I think it's really good—but because they're not podcasts. They're links to MP3 files. The difference is this: with those links, it takes me 3 or more steps to get them from the Internet to my personal digital music player of choice (which happens to be an iPod). The number of steps doesn't matter: it's whether or not the process or automatic that makes it podcasting or not. For the podcasts I'm subscribed to—actually MP3blogs that I made RSS feeds with enclosures for—I got NetNewsWire and iTunes to team up and have the MP3s download automatically at a set time and then go directly to a playlist that automatically get updated on my iPod when I plug it in to my computer. The New York Times Magazine is audioblogging, which is what we used to call 'posting MP3s'.
I'm looking forward to listening to the interviews, which I understand are done in the style of old-time radio drama format. Until those interviews go to my iPod with no manual intervention from users, though, podcasting it ain't.
The only section of The New York Times that I read is the Opinion section and occasionally the Magazine section. Today—or, rather, tomorrow—op-ed editor David Shipley has written an article on what gets printed, how and why pieces are decided for plubication, and when:
To understand Op-Ed, it helps to understand how the page fits into The Times. The paper is divided into two worlds: news and editorial. News is big. With the exception of advertising, it is responsible for just about everything you read in The Times: the national, foreign and metropolitan reports, the Book Review, the magazine and so on. Editorial is tiny. Everything it produces appears on the page you're reading now and the one to its left.
(The last sentence is funny because there is no "left" when looking at an individual article's online version.) I've always prefered the editorial sections of newspapers because, while the news presents itself—falsely, since many "experts" quoted in news articles express the reporter's opinions but with an official seal—as objective, the editorial writers suffer from no such delusions. Partisanship is a scourge, granted, but at least in editorial writings, positive and negative statements are the norm and are expected. Plus, however disagreeable an argument might be, at least on the editorial pages an argument is explicitely being made. The editorial pages usually feature letters to the editor (or, as I call them, unofficial corrections), but I don't pay them too much mind.
Don't you hate reading weblogs and clicking on links to articles at The New York Times and find that they've entered into the paid archives? Finally, a tool that converts weblog-unfriendly URLs from The New York Times into weblog-friendly ones. Adam says that “Richard and I worked feverishly” on it, but I assure you, Adam did at least 99% of the work while I struggled to read The Obedience of a Christian Man by William Tyndale. (Lucky bastard gets to program a cool tool while I read a Protestant treatise. Not that there's anything wrong with Protestant treatises. I'm just saying...)
The letters editor of The New York Times has written on the process by which letters to the editor are published and goes through a few publication guidelines. I find that fascinating, partly because I've always considered the letters to the editor page of publications as the unofficial corrections page. It's actually more than that though: it's a place where readers sound off on what they read in the paper.
Fun anectdote: The member of the British Columbia legislature for my hometown was faced legislative recall because her assistant had sent the local newspaper letters to the editor using a false name. See the second and third paragraphs of the second part of this canoe.ca column.