I do love a 21st century Sunday AM when I can sit down w/ a cup of coffee and nytimes.com on my computer. But sometimes I wonder what all the fuss is over the so-called death of journalism. It's not that there's no good writing in the NYTimes. But there's way too many stories like these two this morning, both different but both full of fail. One was, basically, a re-written press release. The hook for the article was that people find booking travel online to be so frustrating that they're returning to bricks & mortar travel agents. But it quickly became apparent that the only support for this thesis came from one study being touted by one guy, described as a travel industry expert (or some such folderol). If that doesn't scream "paid shill for the travel agents" I don't know what does. Some of the reasons stated for why people find booking online so frustrating were that they had to figure out fees and add-ons all by themselves and had to do research into their own destinations. So flimsy was this premise that the writer of the NYTimes article gave up on it halfway thru and filled the rest of the column with discussion of people's overall all dissatisfaction with air travel and the fact that decreases in fares have been masked by increases in various fees and service charges.
The other big winner in fail was this story about a series of events being run by a bunch of NYC media types that's described as an "off the record, no tweeting, no blogging, no photos, salon." Yeah, none of that pesky social networking stuff to intrude on us living in the moment. Instead we'll just get the whole thing written up in the NYTimes. A more egregious example of public dick-swinging I have not seen in some time. Oooh, look how special and exclusive we all are...

On the other hand, if there were no stupid people in the world, whatever would I complain about?