Specifically in local, I don't think the Times has had an original idea in years. It's got a metro staff of what, 60 reporters, and look at all this innovation: Cityroom, which is a fairly lazy and sleep-inducing ripoff of Gothamist, and The Local, a recently closed ripoff of Brownstoner. Five years ago The Times could have bought the best local blogs in New York for a song— instead, they decided they could do it better in-house, and completely surrendered the 20-40 year old demographic to sites like ours.
Each day in NYC, Gothamist produces 50+ posts, drawn from hundreds of local sources and a dash of our own reporting. We do that with five full time editors and a couple of interns here in DUMBO. How many stories does the Times Metro section produce? 25? Sure, they're all original, but I'd rather read Gothamist- it's more interesting, and it tells me more about the city. That's not to say that the Times doesn't produce credible, interesting local stories- of course they do. But in the paper's slavish devotion to originality and old-fashioned reporting, they've lost their most important civic role, which is being the master curator which tells people in the city what's important each day. They just don't do that for people my age any more.
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Jake Dobkin's response to an e-mail from David Carr about The New York Times is worth reading in it's entirety.
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