New York Times or Wall Street Journal: that is the Question

The New York Times is in deep financial trouble which is, in some part, blamed on the accessibility of its online website depicting many of the same articles a person could read by buying the newspaper. I don't think that's abundantly true, because I believe there are other organic reasons for the decline of the New York Times, but it does make some sense. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the New York Times will begin to charge newspaper consumers for access to its online news, just as the Wall Street Journal does now.

Actually, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal have developed a strategy which allows for some free content while it encourages the reader to pay for an online subscription. The advantages of the online subscription site, which I've used, is that you get much of the news the Wall Street Journal is developing, even before it appears in print. It is likely that model that the New York Times will soon implement in its attempt to reduce its debt to equity ratios. Of course, the New York Times is hoping that it will not lose "eyeballs" on the online pages, so necessary for otherwise declining advertising ratios.

The recession hasn't helped matters much for the New York Times. Much of the New York Times advertising comes from high-end purveyors of luxury goods. It's much the same for the Wall Street Journal which has recently launched an edition aimed at the local New York City - New Jersey - Southern Connecticut metro market. The Wall Street Journal is the model for newspaper success, if there is a model that fits all conditions. In fact, you almost have to read the Wall Street Journal to find out how the sale of BMWs is going, and how the luxury goods market is suffering, and why the Democrat's Congress, in spite of a record number of Wall Street investigations, will be the last American institution to figure out what caused the recent 1000 point drop of the Dow-Jones Industrial Average. If there is a newspaper in the entire world which understands better (and is willing to write about it) the highly political underpinnings of the U.S. government economic policies, I'd like to know about it.

In any case, the Wall Street Journal is doing well, and one of the reasons is that it provides solid, well-researched insider data about what people care most about-money. The writing of the Wall Street Journal, too, reflects the serious, austere, and somewhat dryer tone of the times, even in its feature stories.

I often enjoy reading newspapers like the New York Times, even though I seldom agree with its undercurrents of political suasion. New York Times articles are colorful, language intensive, and reflect the homogenized "diversity" of herds of rich people living in Greenwich Village and North, going all the way up to Central Park East and West, to Columbia University, blocking out certain inelegant neighborhood patches in between. One of the best reasons people have for reading the New York Times is that, during times as tough as these, the New York Times gives us the news just the way we'd like it to be, rather than the way it really is. When it tires of that strategy, it has a great "plan B" which is to focus our attention on the intellectual angst of its music, art, film, theatre, and dance critics. In psychiatric terms, you'd have to say the New York Times has an approach-avoidance relationship with the facts.

The Wall Street Journal has excellent art critics, but few of them, while the New York Times fields a large team which takes Art with a capital "A" more seriously than a 21-gun salute at Arlington National Cemetery or West Point. Art is an imitation and a reflection of life, and greatly enriches our lives, but it, too, has become political in the New York Times and therefore has lost some of its attraction. What used to be fun, inspirational, and a flight from "real life," has now been reduced to an exercise of social engineering as art critics determine its value to the inevitable progressive march to cultural superiority and Manhattanesque intellectual imperium.

I will continue to buy the New York Times off the newsstand if only to read the arts and book sections. I have developed a great capacity to edit imbedded and subliminal political messages even as I read. However, I will not be paying for access to the New York Times online website.

It is a matter of the personal economics that works for me. Though there has been a two-month gap in my subscription to the Wall Street Journal, my wife just interrupted me to say she will renew our subscription under her name in order to take advantage of a Wall Street Journal promotional offer of "2 Weeks Free" and a money saving rate for 26 weeks.

There's a guy named Neal Templin who writes a "cheapskate" column for the Wall Street Journal. One of the recent free articles Neil Templin wrote in the WSJ is called "A Penny Shaved is a Penny Earned." You wouldn't think that a "cheapskate" column about saving money on razor blades would have 106 comments. But that's why the Wall Street Journal is thriving and others are dying. It's a matter of survival skills.