Does the New York Times publish too much fluff?
There have been several complaints recently that the Times has been focusing less on its daily hard news section and devoting more and more of its time to magazine-like “fluff” articles. This Column reinforces this notion and even admits that this is mainly being done to raise advertising dollars, which have slumped in the newspaper industry:
T: Style’s perfume critic — like the advertising-driven concept for the glossy new real estate magazine — is part of The Times’s calculated effort to create new content and publications that will attract additional advertisers. The redesign of most of the paper’s existing weekly sections, such as Travel and Dining, has given them a magazine-like flair intended to increase their appeal to advertisers.
“We don’t put out a daily newspaper; we put out a daily newspaper plus about 15 weekly magazines,” Bill Keller, the executive editor, reminded the news staff at a meeting late last year. “Some of them are actual magazines. But a lot of them, although they’re printed on newsprint, are still — in format, in conception, in design — are magazines.”
As a newspaper journalist myself, I’d say that 95% of the articles I write are focused on straight reporting news items, while the rest are feature-like articles on things that probably wouldn’t be considered “news,” as in they’re not as dated as most the articles I write. Also, these types of articles don’t normally follow the standard inverted pyramid style of writing where the lede summarizes the entire subject in a single sentence.
But calling these articles “fluff,” might be taking it too far, in fact there are some straight news items that would by considered more fluffy than these feature articles. A colleague of mine uses the term “beautiful junk” to describe the filler that goes into papers, stuff that isn’t heavy on information and usually includes several big pictures to take up space. Some kind of local Pumpkin Festival is a great example of this: Reporting on the events in the festival and having lots of pictures even if nothing of particular note happened at the event. It’s still news in its own way, because it just happened, and it follows the typical news style, but what have we learned after the article is finished, other than the fact that the festival took place?
Feature articles are wonderful because they’re more stylistically appealing — the writer can jump around and sometimes even speaks in first person– and are a lot better at relaying a lot of information in a single article. Like a paper’s thesis, general news reporting must always stick to its subject matter, while feature articles can go into their own little tangents and anecdotal stories. The writer is brought to the front of the piece so that the reader can view things as he or she sees them.
This certainly gives these “fluff” items much more appeal, and in some ways just as much worth as your typical NYT news article. They give the stories a New Yorker-like context that isn’t always easy to accomplish with more traditional news reporting.
Related posts: R. W. Apple, Jr. New Yorker profile
