Musings while pondering Pfc. Bradley Manning’s phone call to a previous public editor’s voice mail line:
Last fall, when I took a brief trip to Spain and Italy to visit my daughter on her college semester abroad, I had two blissful newspaper-related experiences â€" both involving The International Herald Tribune.
One was in Barcelona, the other in Florence. In each beautiful city, I sat in a sunny square or piazza, sipping cafe con leche or cappuccino and reading the notably broad pages of The IHT. It was sheer enjoyment â€" the settings, the chance to relax, with the well-chosen global news filtering through this particular journalistic prism.
And I remember having a clear and definite premonition: I’ll never do this again. It was a strange case of nostalgia in advance. I don’t know if there’s a word for that â€" the certain knowledge that this moment ould not come around again.
And indeed, just this week, The Times announced that The International Herald Tribune would be renamed (“rebranded†in today’s inevitable parlance) The International New York Times. The IHT, after many decades of serving as Americans’ link to home, would be no more â€" or at least not in its current form. Much has changed in those decades, most importantly the advent of news available instantly on the Internet. Who needs a broadsheet when you have a smartphone, goes the thinking of many news consumers.
Still, for the European traveler, there was a certain romance to this Paris-based paper, and I always enjoyed its offerings, perhaps even more so in its earlier days when â€" as a partnership between The Washington Post and The New York Times â€" it offered a digest of both of those great papers! (The Times bought out the The Post’s stake in 2003). And when I arrived at The Times last fall, I enjoyed hearing the ranking editor in the news meeting call on “Paris,†usually IHT’s editor, Alison Smale, to express her story preferences via an amplified telephone in the center of the oblong table.
This blog post by Foreign Policy’s Daniel Denzer echoes the feelings I have, and I suspect we’re not alone:
And this more sweeping piece from the Nieman Journalism Lab by Nikki Usher looks at the history and the future of The Times as a global news organization.
One more memory fragment arrives. A few months ago, as I read The IHT in Florence’s Piazza della Repubblica, a small news item caught my eye. Pope Benedict XVI would begin issuing papal messages using his new Twitter account @ontifex. The news, learned from old-fashioned newsprint, about the pope on Twitter made for a postmodern moment.
And, it turns out, an ephemeral one.
The Times is right to pursue its pared-down, global strategy, as the media critic Jack Shafter describes in this Reuters article (including the sale of its New England newspapers, particularly The Boston Globe). That effort is a business imperative â€" probably the key to its survival in the new media world of burgeoning information options and the decline of print advertising revenue. It’s a bittersweet corollary that some parts of its past must yield to the new order.
