Is Maureen Dowd Talking to Herself?
Of course she isn’t, however, sometimes it seems that way. You see I wish I could leave comments on online column posts of hers like this one (probably requires registration). I think a lot of us are reading blogs so often, you must agree that it seems strange to go from a blog to a news site based on print that doesn’t allow comments. The New York Times has excellent blogs that do allow comments, but why haven’t they enabled them for other articles? Why can’t I comment on a news article? It all seems so dated. It seems especially bizaare when you come to an article like Dowd’s and it seems like she’s just talking to some kind of invisible audience. Of course she’s widely read, but still the indirectness is…kind of creepy?
While I think The New York Times is one of the few old media companies doing things that ensure their survival, in many ways they’re still having problems. It is time for them to treat the paper product as an ancillary and not the website (even if for now the former makes most of the money).