Signs of the Old Media Apocalypse?

I suspect that the New York Times is now being written by the people who brought us The Devil Wears Prada (a terrible book that I scanned after having fun reading The Da Vinci Code and decided to try another best-seller). What's wrong with this all-too-common, Manhattan-focused trend story about rich people? Try innuendo, utter absence of facts and a knowing tone that just drives me batty. I don't know how to describe it, but it's the same tone that all these elitist hacks use. Perhaps I've been guilty of it -- it's always tempting to dress up weak reporting with insular editorializing.

This reminds me of another awful article in the Sunday Magazine, this time focusing on a blogger's decline as she worked the online celebrity sliming game. In the usual cautionary arc, she found herself the focus of the same scrutiny she'd leveled at her prey. She called herself an "oversharer," which made me worry -- do I do that? Because while there may be the occasional detail of dirty laundry here or there, I really try to not put out TMI, for my own sake and that of my family. While the author claimed to be cured, I found myself doubting that based on the pictures of her that accompanied the article.

I think we can draw a line between bloggers who do so for business/promotional reasons, as I do, and those who truly keep online diaries describing their affairs and infections and/or traffic in sensationalism for its own sake. Though I may be the only person drawing that line, given that the most innocuous blog post seems to draw fetishists like moths.

Interestingly, Marc Andreessen blogs that he's tired of reporters getting his quotes wrong, so he's going to stop public speaking and increase his blogging -- after all, reporters spend more time scraping quotes off blogs these days than they do interviewing people live or on the phone. He also clearly doesn't like the New York Times, as he's initiated a New York Times death watch and written a scathing analysis of the Gray Lady's board. I don't agree with him that the NYT will die, but he's spent more time thinking about the business side of it than I have, writing some excruciatingly bleh stuff about dual-class stock structures. (Aside: This inability to care about crap like that is probably why I will never be rich.)

Arguably, however, as an entrepreneur with many old and new Web ventures under his belt (the latest, Ning, is a social networking platform), he's a sworn enemy of old media. Just to point out that he too has bias.