Jack Shafer has a piece up claiming Frank Rich will get “lost in the ether” when he leaves the NY Times and is unaware how much the Times masthead helps his exposure. He cites Howard Kurtz as an example, but I can’t judge this because I go out of my way to ignore Howie. I do think that Dan Froomkin, who I used to read daily, is much harder to keep track of at the HuffPo, in part because of my desire not to give them any traffic.
Your thoughts?
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
I think that Frank Rich, of all people, will do just fine.
Indeed, I rather suspect that rather than lose sheer numbers of readers, he will add readers to his new home. A lot of people seek him out, not the Times.
cleek
pundits?
we have too many of them.
cathyx
I think it depends on where he ends up. He has enough following that if he works somewhere well respected, he’ll do just fine.
Froomkin is totally lost in the fray at Huffington Post. Howard Kurtz wasn’t as popular as Rich.
Mudge
I’ll give Rich some credit. He probably isn’t hurting financially and may have difficulty with the new Sulzberger. I have seen any number of “the death of the dead tree media” harangues and perhaps Rich has some ideas outside of that arena. If he has something to say, he’ll be read.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
My guess is every Rich column will be linked to by a couple of dozen blogs with two hours of being published on line, by a couple of hundred (pulling those numbers out of my ass– but if you include comments sections, who knows) within twenty-four hours, and NY mag’s website is gonna see its on line numbers soar.
I pick up the dead tree NYT every other Sunday or so (never during the week, unless I’m stuck in an airport), and Rich was one of the reasons I did so.
terraformer
Indeed, those who have real talent – which unfortunately today equals the ability to practice journalism as it is supposed to be practices – are often sent packing. But opinion writers such as Rich and Froomkin are also all to often sent packing, or otherwise given strong hints to toe the corporate media narrative lest they be shown the door. Froomkin I used to love to read on Pravda; agreed that he is hard to stay track of at HuffPo (maybe because I’m always tempted to click the “who dressed poorly at function X” link next to him.
I don’t follow weeklies, so at least for me it’s a tossup about Rich. But overall, good writing and balanced analysis should find its way into receptive minds regardless of outlet.
Gin & Tonic
He’s going to a well-respected print mag, not disappearing in HuffPo. He’ll do fine, and may even bring people over to NYMag.
ant
Look at what the NYT has done to Nate Silvers online community. It’s a fucking joke now, taking days before comments get posted, and no give and take.
The NYT represents the past when it comes to an online presents.
cathyx
@Mudge: It’s difficult to maintain your principles working for someone you don’t agree with and respect, which I suspect is the reason that Rich is leaving. Some people have to swallow their pride and do it anyway for financial reasons. But if Rich doesn’t need to stay for the money, then he should move on.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Huff Po’s a freakin’ mess– the lay-out, the links, everything.
Howie Kurtz is like Mike Allen, someone everyone Jack Schafer (and Howie Kurtz and Mike Allen) reads, but very few people outside that bubble. I think (hope?) Maureen Dowd is heading that way.
BGinCHI
I sincerely hope this is the stupidest fucking piece I read today.
Jesus, Jack, take yes for an answer. That paragraph is unbelievable, as it provides the answer and then discards it.
Further, to compare Rich to Kurtz is the tell. Rich is at the top of his game and Howie never had one.
It’s the quality of the writing that will get it out there, and the way the newspaper platform is headed, I don’t blame Rich at all. Sinking ships…..
LarsThorwald
He will no more drop into the ether than Keith Olbermann moving to Current TV.
Ash Can
Sounds to me like someone’s nose is out of joint that he didn’t get the New York gig instead of Rich.
Ija
I don’t know, it does seem weird. He’ll go from writing a weekly column to a monthly column, that’s a quick way of disappearing. As much as we criticize NYT, it still has a certain cache that New York Magazine lacks. Maybe he knows something about how dire the situation at NYT really is? We’ll see if other journalists from NYT start jumping ship.
ETA: I wonder if it has something to do with the coming NYT paywall. Columnists would probably be the first to go behind the paywall. That’s also a quick way of disappearing.
A Commenter at Balloon Juice (formerlyThe Grand Panjandrum)
Jack who?
Disco
Do you NOT visit Huffington Post because their web site is a horrific, ungly tangle of bullshit HTML, ads, facebook links, etc?
Or just because Arianna Huffington is the most boring guest Keith Olbermann ever had?
BGinCHI
@Disco: Letter D, or, all of the above.
How many ways can they talk about divorce on that site? It’s fucking creepy.
Comrade Mary
@Disco: All of the above.
Southern Beale
Frank Rich is leaving the New York Times? I didn’t know that … who are they going to replace him with … Herman Cain?
David Koch
Jack Shafer is our guy, you know. He’s one of us.
Bud
John – why do you dislike the HuffPo? I know they are heavy on the celebrity news, but otherwise they have many engaging writers.
And as for Frank Rich – I think he’s a tremendous writer and I generally agree with him, but he has had his moments of total adherence to village groupthink.
UncommonSense
I agree that Rich will be read much less widly at NY Mag than he was at the Times. It was the Times, after all.
The mag obviously offered him a massive amount of money to make the move, so maybe that offsets the diminished exposure and influence he must know will result.
I hardly ever read Froomkin anymore, either. I’m not sure why. When he was at the Post, I usually got to him through his RSS feed. He has an RSS feed at the HuffPo, but before today I never thought about putting it in my reader.
rickstersherpa
I believe Jack Shafer forgets that the NY Times will be putting up a paywall really sooon which is going to cut the readership down quite bit. Rich did not enjoy his previous experience when the old Grey Lady attempted to pay wall its colunmists a few years back. Also, he may want the lighter workload and the idea of working on HBO projects.
jak
I think Frank Rich will do just fine. Even more so if and when the NYT goes behind a paywall.
TheColourfield
It has to be about the paywall. That will hurt Krugman once it goes up as you won’t be able to link to him anymore.
Rich already writes in blogging form anyway with plenty of links in his online version so moving to NY Mag where his primary readership will be web based won’t be hard for him.
UncommonSense
Speaking of:
Frank Rich: ‘Nothing’ Could Have Kept Me At The New York Times
Triassic Sands
@Ija:
That was my first thought. For Rich the calculation may not be what is his exposure today at the NYT versus New York Magazine, but what will it be after the Times ceases to be free. When the Times did its earlier experiment with charging for certain features, I quit reading anything I couldn’t find easily elsewhere.
rickstersherpa
Dan is still doing good work and you can get an RSS feed directly to his site. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/28/wartime-contractors-waste-billions_n_829251.html
John, I can’t stand the Washington Post (or as Dean Baker refers to them, “Fox on 15th Street), and I hope Grahams and Fred Hiatt’s fish wrap goes out of businees daily, but I still check out Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent, Steve Perlstein and Tom Boswell (baseball geek that I am.
Doug Hill
Rich is a bit of special case because he’s such a good writer and critic — he’s not Wolcott good but he’s good — so who knows, but I think that Shafer’s point is right in principle.
Kejia
I think the upcoming paywall at NYT wld hurt his readership more. As for huffpo, I unsubscribed from their rss feeds at time of sale and haven’t felt the lack. By comparison, Atlantic Wire just revamped their page this morning and messed up rss feed and I’ve been fuming about it. Huffpo is no loss. And Rich will be fine.
Nemo_N
I usually drop writers if their new site is too cluttered.
cokane
Howard Kurtz is worthless and to my mind has never written a single insightful column. I fail to get the comparison.
LM
I can’t remember the last time Rich said anything in any column that anyone who reads lefty blogs couldn’t have predicted he’d say. I know he’s beloved for believing what we believe, but when does he offer fresh insights or new information? If he’s stale and predictable four times a month maybe cutting back to once a month will give him time to find new ways into stories? Either way, he’ll be quoted all over, and linked to, and easy to find. I don’t know if he’ll step up his game and make it worth following the links, though.
Jeff
In terms of readership I can’t see how this is close. Big platform to small platform; and frankly, while I value some of his stuff (aside from the “What John Boehner Can Learn From Inception” bits), he’s just not churning out essential stuff. Most of his cache came from having a monster amount of column space on the most important dead-tree platform there is.
eemom
meh, Rich has a good column once in a while but more often he’s a glorified concern troll.
Poor lunatic-savant Somerby was right about him.
Bill H.
Anyone who goes to the Huffington Post has utterly disappeared so far as I am concerned; has gone into a black hole of nonexistence and will not even reemerge in the form of x-rays.
Jim Pharo
I guess I’m in the minority, but I think Rich will fade as a voice, in part due to the profile of New York but more so due to the monthly schedule. The discipline of having to come up with something large-ish on a weekly basis forced Frank to cull the tea leaves and make connections where others didn’t. He also was a sort of bridge between left-world and MSM land. I don’t think once a month is going to be very useful in terms of bringing real-world thinking to MSM-land, especially when that land is New York. The imprimatur of the NY Times brand was valuable to him.
Much the same with Froomkin. I think he’s lost now as a persuader. The WaPo brand gave him legitimacy in the eyes of people who would otherwise dismiss him. He also benefitted from the discipline of having to track the misdeeds of the Bush WH every day.
It’s painful to contemplate, but the loss of Rich, like the loss of Froomkin (and Oberman) are just dead losses. Putting yet another tea-hadist in at the NY Times or WaPo is a victory for the other side.
Having these cross-over voices is key, as the right knows well. When we lose them, we’re hurt.
Jeff
On a very similar note, I think the same thing about The Daily Beast. Is there anything ever written on The Daily Beast that is important? I will read Andrew Sullivan when he goes there, and maybe that will cause me to click on some links that I otherwise wouldn’t have. But honestly I have never seen anything interesting there. I know Yglesias writes, and I’m sure he’s one of the better writers, but I think he’s bland in sanitized-column form. Who else? Howard Kurtz, Meghan McCain, and Reihan Salam seem to be the three people I always see write, and none of them is worth reading.
Tina Brown being the proprietor just makes it very easy to ignore.
Doug Hill
@eemom:
I agree with you.
RosiesDad
I agree with you; going from high profile weekly exposure to monthly exposure is going to reduce the prominence of Rich’s voice. Now they do say that he will be an editor-at-large at the magazine but what that really means remains to be seen.
I also wonder if Rich’s move doesn’t have to do with other changes at the Times, where a number of Sunday Magazine columnists were fired as that part of the weekend paper is revamped. (I am going to miss Randy Cohen’s Ethicist column.)
Joy
@Comrade Mary: Second that.
eemom
@Bill H.:
I will have you know that literally caused me to spew Diet Pepsi at my monitor.
Arclite
@ John:
So, it’s okay to give traffic to WaPo, but not HuffPo?
cokane
@LM: I think Rich was ahead of the ballgame on the Koch brothers financing the tea party and general conservative agenda.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
Undoubtedly he will get far less exposure. Maybe that’s not the be-all for Frank Rich? Maybe he’s tired of writing tepid, house-liberal columns? Maybe he’s tired of calling the former Vice President “Mr. Cheney”? John, If the NYT offered you a blog, where of course you’d have to drop the profanity and address everybody “Mr.” or “Ms.” would you do it?
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Here is a good place to note that it is easier to find out what my government is doing and saying at the Guardian than at the NYT. I’m this close to removing the NYT button on my browser and replacing it with the Guardian.
timb
@David Koch: Amen. A prick that close to Podhoretz is not someone whose opinion needs listened to. He is a hippie punching machine
ornery curmudgeon
My first thought, Cole, is about how interesting it is to hear that you understand the value of not providing links to places you don’t wish to magnify in the public square.
My second thought recalls the many, many (many) MANY links you’ve made to Sully over just the past year … and politico, and reason etc., etc.
Oh Oh! another thought about what a f’in hypocrite you are…
Oh, and also! Another thought about how extremely valuable this whole blogging business has been to keeping the media honest.
Nellcote
Krugman aside, are there any Liberal-ish columnists left at the NYT?
Gunner
Why is Jack Shafer so concerned about Frank Rich? Besides, Frank will be fine. At least he’s not writing for Slate.
Mr. Long Form
It seems like every year I drop another section of the Sunday NYT into the trash pile. Will Week in Review by next? Can I spend $5 just to do the damn crossword? I wish they would let you buy just the pieces you want — does anyone actually read that crap about zillionaires remodeling their villas?
Thomas Beck
I completely agree with this – I even tweeted about it yesterday – a year from now, Rich will be much less influential than he is today, at least publicly. Perhaps he’ll shape New York Magazine into a major force, a leader in our discourse, but I doubt it. I think he’s making a mistake.
For me, the question is, which wingnut nonentity will the Times get to replace him? I’m wondering if Alan Keyes is available…
Just Some Fuckhead
Who cares.
Maude
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I’m with you. Will you be at the book club Sunday?
uptown
People still read the NYT? Next you’ll be telling me that the Washington Post still publishes.
cokane
@Nellcote: Dowd is liberal, but vapid and fact-free. So, an embarrassing liberal.
Kristof is liberal. He provides solid analysis.
Some others I’m less familiar with, but Charles Blow seems to be liberal, Gail Collins and Bob Herbert as well.
catclub
@cokane: Your nym makes me wonder about Cokie Roberts. She is real skinny, it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@eemom: This.
Brachiator
The Times is getting lost in the ether as people move away from old media.
Frank Rich may suffer not because the Times masthead helps his exposure, but because pundits who are not rigid right wing gasbags may have a harder time attracting attention.
Although I don’t think that it will work in the long run, I can understand the HuffPo-AOL attempt to bring bloggers and pundits under a central banner.
nadezhda
Re Froomkin, his gig at the HuffPo is totally different from the daily links fest/analysis he produced at WaPo. As I understand it, he’s more an editor than a regular writer.
I follow him via his RSS feed, and I don’t find any timing pattern — seems to just be when he’s got something he really wants to say on something that gets him interested that he thinks is worth digging into a bit. But he’s not doing “original reporting” — more pulling together and commenting on stuff from various sources. He may go for a week or more without a post, and then publish a couple of posts the same day on different topics. Always worth reading – so he stays in my RSS reader.
LanceThruster
I agree with not giving the Puff Ho additional traffic. When a writer is good, he/she is worth seeking out. Frank Rich should do fine.
Jason
I understand the HuffPo is a tabloid site, but is there any particular reason why John Cole doesn’t want to give them traffic — are they any worse than say, Slate or Salon?
draftmama
huffpo really sucks – it takes ages to load with all those ads and stuff, its stacked with junk and anyway the fact that Huffington made all that money on the backs of writers who contributed for nothing is truly pathetic. Howard Fineman – how does it feel now?
Pat
I’ll miss reading Frank on Sunday mornings. Boy, things are getting suckier by the week, no?
Ronzoni
@TheColourfield:
I recall the last time the Times tried a paywall. Not to worry. Some kind soul(s) will post Krugman somewheres—FOR FREE! I never missed a column during that sad period, and i don’t expect I will now.
LanceThruster
@Jason: My rationale is the level of gatekeeping that serves to maintain the “official Israeli narrative”. Pro-Zionists have pretty near unrestricted leeway to endlessly spout false memes, but the ability to get rebuttals posted that otherwise meet all their posting criteria is limited.