The business section of today's New York Times carries a front-page article on Internet "me-zines" that dwells on the fact that Kausfiles.com has made a "profit." The article carries a graphic that runs with the line "How Mickey Kaus made more profit than The New Yorker magazine."
Now, Smartertimes.com is a big fan of Kausfiles.com, though it doesn't always agree with it. And there's clearly a certain tongue-in-cheek aspect to the Times article. But for the Times to pass along with even a hint of seriousness Mr. Kaus's claim -- "Pseudo.com, dead. Feed, on ice. Inside, sold. Salon, dying. Kausfiles, profitable" -- is just silly. For one thing, the "expenses" listed for Kausfiles.com don't include any salary or work space for him. If The New Yorker didn't pay its writers anything and didn't budget any money for their offices, it could be "profitable" too. The main expense of Kausfiles.com, by far, is the opportunity cost of Mr. Kaus's time. In the hours he spends working on the Web site, he could be doing something else that would earn him a salary. To declare his time worth nothing and then to consider the site "profitable" is a kind of legerdemain that is amusing in a one-liner from Mr. Kaus, but ridiculous when extended into a full-length trend story on the front of the Times business section.
The same Times article reports that the me-zines "Sometimes take pride in what they do not write." The article then quotes Joshua Micah Marshall of the j-marshall.com/talk site as saying, "For a number of reasons, I've tried to make these virtual pages a Condit/Chandra-free zone." This is a totally out-of-context quote, even though the Times mentions that Mr. Marshall wrote about missing intern Chandra Levy this weekend. Here's the full quote, from Mr. Marshall's Web site: "Of late, for a number of reasons, I've tried to make these virtual pages a Condit/Chandra free zone. But let me add one note regarding today's developments. " The "of late" makes it clear that Mr. Marshall had been following the Condit/Chandra developments quite closely -- in fact, as Kausfiles.com has noted, Mr. Marshall's site was "Chandra Central." It looks like the author of the Times article that is partly about Mr. Marshall's site hasn't actually been reading the site particularly closely.
Late Again: The arts section of today's New York Times carries a review of an Emmylou Harris concert that happened on the afternoon of July 4 at Battery Park. Today is July 9. The review is seven paragraphs long. There are a couple of possible explanations here. It's possible that the Times reviewer writes so slowly that he only turns out about two paragraphs a day, and the review was rushed into print as soon as it was finished. It's also possible that the review was written immediately after the concert and that there just wasn't room for it in the Times arts section until today. The space until today was all filled up with a review of a new pottery museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, and other articles that apparently took precedence over reviewing a concert that 15,000 New Yorkers attended.
Late Again: The national section of today's New York Times carries an article under the headline, "Some Lawmakers Urging U.S. to Speed Exports of Satellites." The article reports on legislation offered by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Rep. Howard Berman that would put decisions on technology transfer to China in the hands of the Commerce Department. Jim Mann of the Los Angeles Times had almost the exact same story on June 4, 2001. The New York Times waddles in more than a month later and, of course, fails either to mention the earlier L.A. Times account or to move the story significantly forward.