An article in the Thursday Style section reports:
In the 1990s, ABC Carpet on lower Broadway ushered in its own major rug trend, selling Orientals that had been dyed in bright colors like pink, blue, red or silver. Seemingly every well-off woman who instructed her hairdresser to give her the "Jennifer Aniston" had one.
But ubiquity has a way of creating openings for new things to come along. Or as Ryan Korban, the design guru to the fashion designers Alexander Wang and Joseph Altuzarra, put it: "ABC carpet hasn't changed substantially in 10 years. Tell me you don't agree with me. It's the same chairs and the same rugs as they had when I was in college. There's only so many times you can go to the same place and look at the same kind of stuff."
You might expect ABC Carpet to have gotten an opportunity to respond in the Times to this harsh criticism, but the article does not include a response or any indication that one was sought before publication. Maybe this is hypocritical of me because I'm not seeking the Times' response to this criticism before publication, but it seems like shabby treatment. What made me notice it particularly is that ABC Carpet used to be a major advertiser in the print New York Times. It's hard to imagine the store getting this sort of treatment from the Times back in that era when it was a major advertiser.
It's often argued that the shift to reader or subscriber revenue and away from advertising revenue is a healthy journalistic development for the Times because the newspaper's incentives are better aligned by being beholden to readers rather than to advertisers. Now the newspaper can write negative things about retailers without having to worry about losing advertising revenue, because there isn't revenue to lose. This example, though, may be an indicator that that view is too positive. Maybe the consequence is that the Times can now treat New York-based retailers just as poorly as it treats other people and companies that it writes about. It's not necessarily clear that that's a good development from the standpoint of journalistic quality.