Sail on, Gray Lady, sail on by

Yahoo News seems to be the first on the internet with the news that Janet Robinson, CEO of the New York Times, is resigning at the end of the month. Her departure is attributed to shareholder discontent with share value, resulting from inadequate revenue from subscriptions and advertising.

I might have used this news as a springboard for discussing the woes that confront print journalism nationwide, as newspapers find themselves faced with ever-increasing competition from free on-line news sites and blogs, at the time of a poor national economy.

Instead, I choose to note the almost universal chortling of joy expressed in anonymous on-line comments to the article, declaring the Gray Lady to be a worthless liberal rag, good only for lining bird cages. The sooner she dies the better.

I have a lifelong friend, a passionate conservative, who proudly declares that he never reads the NYT -- wouldn't allow the filthy propaganda sheet in his house. As a liberal who regularly reads the Fox News website, just to see what arguments are coming from the other side, I find this attitude hard to understand.

Newspapers offer readers a continuum of quality. There are terrible British newspapers -- many of them -- that I'd never bother reading, not so much because I disagree with their editorial policy as because they're full of sensationalistic nonsense. But there are few American papers, at least ones with a national following, that arouse that response in me. Right wing, left wing, or moderate -- most papers try to walk the perilous tightrope of bringing legitimate news to the community while still making a profit for their owners or shareholders.

But they do differ in quality. If an apolitical alien dropped down from Outer Space, and did his best to expunge every iota of bias from Fox News and the New York Times -- an impossible task, apart from the opinion page, since every decision selecting stories for publication rests on the editor's subjective sense of what he considers "important" and "newsworthy" -- the disparity between the two would be obvious and dramatic. Fox News would then be seen as combining many features of USA Today with certain features of People magazine. With even a dash of seasoning, perhaps, from National Enquirer.

The NYT, on the other hand, would still come close to justifying its somewhat overstated claim of being "America's Newspaper of Record." In the Times, you find in-depth reporting of international and national news that you simply can't find elsewhere in a newspaper format. But political news is only a fraction of what you get for your two bucks at the news stand -- over a week's time, you also receive detailed news -- by writers with expertise in their fields -- of music, arts, popular culture, books, fashion, business, sports. If I were totally uninterested in politics and international relations, I'd still subscribe to the NYT for its daily reporting of those other areas of life in which I did have an interest.

I'm not sure, on the other hand, that any of my right wing friends would bother to click on Fox News (or watch it on TV) if it weren't for the political slanting that the site offers.

The New York Times is not going to die, despite the fervent wishes of on-line commentators, any more than the Wall Street Journal will die, despite my own occasional raised eyebrows with respect to its editorial policy. Both newspapers are major assets in the world of American (and world) journalism. We would be a more poorly informed nation without them.