What Keeps Me Up At Night

[Warning: What follows is a small piece on The New York Times which will drive media-haters and likely many conservatives crazy. If you fall in either broad category, be warned that this post may raise your blood pressure.]

At night, lying in snugly in your bed, people have different fears of what lurks in the dark. For children and adults, these fears obviously vary greatly. Whereas kids fear monsters, adults might fear job loss, financial problems, or nuclear terrorism. At some point when I was a kid, after I read "Cujo" by Stephen King, I had a deathly fear that there was a red-eyed monster in my closet that would come out after my parents had gone to sleep.

Well, these days while I no longer go into sweats after seeing scary movies (or at least that is what I tell chicks), I have a new fear when I am in the dark, and it involves something much dark and sinister than the bogeyman or a mob of monsters: I am terrified that The New York Times may be on its last legs. The prospect of the Times somehow out of existence is sometimes too much for me to bear.

Like the rest of newspapers out there, the Times is bleeding money every day, and it is unclear what, if anything will stanch the deluge. Part of this because newspapers are no longer as valued with news easily obtainable from various mediums including the Internet. As a result, newspapers are becoming less and less profittable, and thus unable to contend with the high costs associated with running a broadsheet. Additionally, the Times made a huge blunder several years ago when the controlling (and founding) Sulzberger family took the company public in an attempt to make a little more money. That was a grievous error which will continue to cost the organization and the paper in the longterm.

I know, I know. These are the classic, and perhaps pitiful rantings of an East Coast liberal who thinks the Times is the only place to get news. Are many Times readers elitist in some way? Yes. But do I think the Times is the only place to get news in this country? Of course not; I only think the Times is the best place to get news.

Yet, I am not one bit talking about the politics involved here. I think people who rail at the Times miss an important point. Sure, the Times' editorial page is slanted toward the left. Heavily. Its columnists are also nearly universally of the Big "D" persuasion. But why should that matter? That Times' is still, by a wide, wide margin, the best newspaper and news source in the entire world. Bar none. There is no source out there where the quality of the writing, the uniqueness of the stories, and the breadth of the coverage is as detailed and complete as that in the New York Times. It is not even close. The loss of the New York Times would be catastrophic for this country, and for the quality of other news outlets which try to emulate the Times not just in overall quality, but also in covered subject matter.

For those media-bashers who loathe the Times and can't stand the sight of the Gray Lady's famous editorial page, I have a simple retort: if you don't like the back two pages of Section A, just skip them. As I said, there is doubt that the editorial page is just about all left-wing But I do not think this detracts one iota from the overall fabulous quality of the rest of the paper. I know that I won't find something close anywhere else. Not in print, not on the web, and certainly not on CNN/Fox News/MSNBC. I live in Washington, and to those who have said to me that the Washington Post is as good or better than the Times are out of either insane or lying to themselves. The Post is a fine regional paper with some good stuff on the White House, Capitol Hill, and some select international affairs. Nonetheless, comparing the Post to the Times is like comparing a fine cod dinner to lobster tail, filet mignon, and jumbo shrimp. It is not even fair.

And you know what? Despite leaning more to the left than to the right in matters of politics, I never read the editorials. Never with a capital "N". I never read the vapid Maureen Dowd, I never read Paul Krugman, I never read Bob Herbert, and I never read Nicholas Kristoff. (I do, however, read Frank Rich, whose exquisite political take-downs usually elegantly express what I can only think and occasionally shout out loud in incoherent terms). This is not because they are bad writers or I do not agree with their general worldviews, but because I am simply not interested in what they have to say. I enjoy getting my news straight from a basic source, wherever I find it. To borrow from Fox News' famous credo, I like to get my reporting, and then decide what I think.

I wish haters of the Times would do the same. Just because the editors are slanted in their backpage stuff, does not mean that you should ignore the rest of the paper, which is not nearly as slanted in its writing. Those that feel this way should forget the editorials and the fiery columns, and instead judge the paper for its quality on every other page. Using that test makes it much more difficult to impugn the Times' considerable strengths.

Clearly, like the hundreds of other newspapers facing dire financial situations today, the Times has limited options besides continual cutbacks. One idea that has been bandied about a lot recently has been for the Times to begin charging subscription fees to access any of online content. Naturally, a lot of people have been critical of this idea, noting that the Times' popular website would lose a large majority of its regular traffic, with many people going elsewhere to get their news.

While I would not love the idea of the Times charging fees to read its sites, fees that could be potentially high, I would absolutely pay just about anything they required. For one thing, the Times' webpage has been the very best news website out there for years, ever since I started using the Internet back in college. Unlike many papers, the Times puts all of its material right online. Its page has always been pretty sleek and easy to access and navigate. Additionally, as I noted above, the page has totally free (except for a brief time when the editorial page was behind a pay-wall) to anyone who wants to read it and create an account name. In other words, readers have been enjoying the online content at no charge for over a decade. For this reason, I would have no issue with being asked to finally pay something for a paper I would have had to buy from a newstand. It would be equittable, not to mention fully worth it as the Times webpage has gotten really innovative in the last few months.

Forgive me if this post comes across as a gross New York Times lovenote over a week before Valentine's Day. It was only meant to be a little gushing. I just wanted to spell out how important the Times is not just to me, but to anyone who enjoys or appreciates terrific writing and news coverage. As the Times begins to sink deeper into financial trouble, I will continue to be terrified -- yes, terrified -- of the prospect that the Times could somehow cease to exist. I do not question that the newspaper industry as a whole is dying, though I certainly mourn it. However, to me, the New York Times is more than a run-of-the-mill newspaper. It is an American institution that is irreplaceable, and the world would be a worse-off place without it.