Oh you mean like the 'real' artists who have been copying Marcel Duchamps' urinal for over 100 years, tingling all over at just how radical and unconventional they are? Give me a break. This is nothing more than marketing for both Apple and the artist. I'd be embarrassed to both have made the art and to be the magazine that is displaying it. Sad to say I subscribe to the New Yorker. If their writing had as little so show for it as this art I'd drop my subscription tomorrow.

There has been a great deal of technological hype in the news over the last 10 years (and maybe 100 years if I really investigated). Newspapers, magazines, tv and other media often don't understand a topic well. But they do see a 'hook' they can use to latch onto something they don't understand. So the media see a new Kindle and think it will save newspapers. Or twitter will save just about anything. 'Everyone knows: Live Goes Better with Twitter!'. Or in this case: 'Look at this: if you wanted to you could make a drawing on your teeny little iphone'. You wouldn't have any control over line because the screen is too small to allow any subtlety of hand movement, the way you can with a pen or pencil on a sheet of paper. And it's so small you can't see any detail, so you don't know how it will look when it's printed much larger. And the color is probably off and won't look like what it will when it's printed. But you can say you did it on a phone. That's all that counts. We've got a hook! Print it.

Something similar happened recently with birding and The World Series of Birding. Most media will ignore birding for an entire year or more. Then along comes the World Series of Birding, which has a familiar, measurable, sportlike aspect to it. That's a hook. So everybody covers The World Series of Birding. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just that it misses what birding is to most people. But normal birding doesn't have that hook.

You say that there is a limit to what can be parsed easily. But there is no such objective limit. Why do people continue to read such writers as James Joyce and Henry James? Obviously some readers do parse them and enjoy doing so. Of course fiction is not the same as non-fiction.

Nonetheless not all readers want or enjoy non-fiction writing that sacrifices nuance for simplicity. Sometimes, in fact most times from what I can tell, writing is so pared down, so simple, as to not have much substance to it. Obviously this is partially subjective. What is richly complex and rewarding to one reader is muddled and confusing to another. Every author needs to make a choice as to just who their audience is.

But there is no reason that an author needs to write for the lowest common denominator. That may be your suggestion but there's no reason that anyone else need agree with it.
I realize that you said you were writing with the good intention of helping the author be more effective in reaching his audience and I don't want to question that.

My argument is that I think that you are wrong in being so uncompromising in your idea of what is good and clear writing. Entangled clauses can be both better for explaining a subject and more enjoyable reading for the right audience.

I've spent a lot of time over the last month reading legal documents. They are incredibly complex and I'm only reading them because they refer to the company I work for. It is difficult reading. But as I've read them I've understood that their seeming complexity is really just an attempt to put very complex thoughts into precise, language. When I was done I admired the language used even though it had been a pain to understand it. But that's the value of language: it can help explain complicated subjects.

Your writing is just fine. If you read actual legal notes, as I've been doing recently, you realize how convoluted writing really can be. It's sad that most readers can no longer read a sentence with more than one clause in it. That's the reader's problem, not yours. God forbid that writing should sink to the level of the lowest common denominator.

This is one reason I can't see the internet ever replacing newspapers or magazines. The latter are designed for slower, more thoughtful reading. The former is better for quick news bytes and shorter bits of information. They both have their place. But many problems are complex and can only be explained in a complex way. Of course the best writers still manage to make their complex explanations seem simple. But none do it without multiple clauses. That's just part of explaining something in terms more simple than black and white.

Worse than that there are too many people at newspapers wasting time, energy and hope on tech solutions. They most likely will not work because: 1, they don't address the problem of greatly declining PRINT(read costly enough to support a reporting staff) advertising; and 2, some loyal readers, myself included, hate to read the news digitally. I have to say I've never tried reading from an apparition in the sky, though.............

Obviously newspapers are in real trouble and they have to consider all solutions. My fear is that they'll put too much time, energy and hope with something this and then be in even sadder shape when they realize it wasn't the answer. I wish I knew the answer.

As a sidelight it's interesting that both Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger said the loss of newspapers would be a tragedy while at the same time saying that there is no way in the world they would invest additional money in them.

I'm replying to a number of people here who asked why I say that selling ads doesn't work. It's strictly financial. How much are advertisers willing to pay to place advertisements on web pages? Not nearly enough numerous recent studies have shown. It has little to do with what users do with the ads - block them, click them or whatever. Web sites make money by selling ads to advertisers. If advertisers won't pay enough for them then sites don't make money. In particular they make little money in comparison to what they get in payment for print advertising, even though print advertising is in a tremendous decline. In addition, and I have to say I've read various articles saying that they do/don't make enough money from online advertising to pay for the online staff.

That in fact goes back to the original article. The people who were going to fund the online paper said that 3,000 subscribers was just not anywhere near enough money to support a staff of 30. My guess is that they also found a severe lack of advertising income.

Except 'selling ads' doesn't work and it doesn't come close to the amount of money made from print ads. That, and the tremendous problems that the current recession has brought to newspapers, is why they're considering charging for access. This venture is a bit different in that it's trying to replace a failed print paper not augment one.

Opinions go back and forth on this and most of them are not unbiased. Tell certain people that you have to charge for online news and they'll call you a Luddite who lives in the past, chases already failed dreams, etc. But I think most people who know anything about the industry and its economics know that online news is not a winning economic proposition, particularly if it is funded by ads. Those who believe that it is a winning model have to assume that things will change drastically after the recession. No one really knows but I suspect that they won't and this has been a foolish business strategy.

Nor is news free. In fact there is talk now of getting most print based web sites to coordinate the change to subscription. Thus you go from 'all the news is free' to 'no news is free.' People who say the news is free are idiots. It takes a tremendous amount of work and money to cover the news in a substantive way. And this has nothing to do with ideology. It costs the same for both left and right leaning papers. So news may seem free but it isn't. There is a large cost and for it to continue someone has to pay for it. In any case print papers are finally realizing that they are losing readers, and perhaps advertisers, because there is this thought that news is free and that it doesn't make sense to pay for a print newspaper.

They thought they might counter this with online sites and make up the lost money in online advertising. That didn't happen. So in this recession, with many papers filing for bankruptcy protection they have to consider all options, including pay sites. This would make little sense if people can get the news they want free elsewhere. But if all newspapers institute the same policy things might change. Newspapers know it is a huge gamble. But so is bankruptcy.

Well maybe,just maybe, that's the very reason that they're so popular! They give users what they want, not what someone in marketing/advertising thinks users ought to want, or what will give them a few more ad dollars but drive users off. They're old cliches but it seems silly to argue with success or fix what's not broken.

I'm going to make a very broad statement here: the most successful parts of the internet give users content, not advertising. Advertising revenue is a byproduct and it's a mistake to make it the priority as many sites have done, all the while arguing of course that they haven't.

Sadly I agree with you that consumers will go with what's cheapest, though it just hit me that today of all day's proves the opposite. Detroit made cheap cars. But people chose more expensive but better cars, at least I think that's a viable theory. Nonetheless I think that you're generally correct.

But my point is that the original article seemed to indicate that there would be equivalent investigative journalism on HuffPo that there currently is in print. Or at least it can approximate it. But I doubt that's true, as the thread to which I responded also argued, because HuffPo hasn't thought of all the costs involved in true, investigative journalism.

You seem to be saying that people will accept the cheapest news they can find, regardless of quality. And I'm afraid you may be right. But that's not the same as saying that they'll also get investigative journalism. That isn't done cheaply. They may get something. But they won't get something equivalent to print investigative journalism.

Sorry I've been "paradigmed-shifted" to death. Paradigm shifts are recognized long after the fact. Contemporaneous paradigm-shifts are not paradigm-shifts at all: they're someone trying to further their own objectives coupled with wishful thinking about the future.

I don't know how many times I've read this identical analysis about the future of journalism: all successful journalists will be BRANDS. We'll see. My guess is that in 5 years any journalists that are still around will look back at the self-promotional branding of the last few years they same way that older journalists look back at photos of themselves wearing flower-patterned bell-bottoms....... Did I really look like that? Did I really do that?

I tend to agree with you but given the populace's ignorance about journalism(see the idiotic replies to the original post that ignore it and instead choose it as a stepping off point for rants of the left and right political persuasion) it's hard to believe that anyone will understand the importance of what you say.

We now seem to have a generation of people who believe that only the web produces anything of importance, that anything of importance can be completely comprehended in the 30 seconds that it takes to read the lengthiest web post, that all information wants to be free, and that this 'free-ness' has no cost to anyone. You're talking about cost and it sure seems to me that the vast majority of people who comment on the press (whether print, broadcast, or web) don't have the slightest idea about COST. It's a nasty little detail that they'd prefer to ignore.

Highly rewarding short-term strategies will result in the negligence of long-term possibilities.

I can't disagree with you on that. Financial Times had a lengthy article on this last summer I think, long before the real meltdown.

But I do think that it's a mistake to say that this was just a matter of over-leveraging, or of compensation. I do partially blame it on speed.

When you can do things quickly, whether the speed is through internet connectivity, computing power or whatever there is a tendency to blindly trust the accuracy of the information. I once needed to code some AP election tables so that they would appear in a newspaper with new calculations and formatting. It looked great and worked quickly. I TRUSTED that speedy computation and formatting. But I happened to notice that when the live returns started coming in they totaled more than 100%. Oops. It all looked good but it wasn't. My experience is that people are far too trusting with the speedy results that technology gives them.

Not being a participant in any of this I only have an outsider's perspective. But something obviously went wrong in many places: CDOs and other structured investments that were very risky; ratings agencies that said they weren't; people eager to make a fast buck, both buyers and sellers. But I wonder how many of the so-called adults in the room, the investment banks and ratings agencies among others, weren't a bit intoxicated by technology: the models worked, the bets were safe. I wonder if they'd been slower and done more investigation by hand if they'd have come to different conclusions.

Or maybe as others have suggested I'm just confusing speed with greed.

Thanks for the link. I'm unfamiliar with him but did read, too speedily I have to say, his thoughts on the crash. Unfortunately, and I'm not trying to be obnoxious, they strike me as unproven theories at best, and more likely just nonsense.

Perhaps due to my age I've lived through a number of movements, of life-changing, consciousness-changing events. Guess what? The changes were minor. Life didn't change, nor did human consciousness.

Where did the current crisis stem from? the answer is: subprime mortgages; housing credit that proved unsustainable; land. The victims are the hundred of thousands of people who are going to lose their homes. The whole concept of sedentarism had already been challenged by immigrants, exiles, deportations, refugees - and the delocalisation of economic activities. This phenomenon is bound to increase

So what the financial crisis is really a challenge to the 'concept of sedentarism?' I don't think so. The problem with writers such as this is that they know enough about a number of subjects to theorize possible connections between seemingly dissimilar fields. When I first read Marshall McLuhan I was dazzled by his abilities to do this. The problem is that it's like a magician. The audience is too busy being dazzled to notice the tricks, lack of proof, illogic, etc.

Since I've never read him before I don't feel right in criticizing further. Perhaps I'd find more in further reading. But so far I have to say, in spite of what I think are your good intentions regarding him, that I don't find much there.

But I would add I read him quickly. I've found that I always read more speedily, and with less comprehension on the web. Maybe I need to slow down and read a book............

That's true. There is much that can be done more quickly. And I for one won't argue with being able to do my taxes more quickly, or many of other such things.

But I wonder what's been lost. For instance why has the Slow Food movement been so popular for so long. Why do I find blogs about slow painting? Why is there a Take Back Your Time day? As far as I'm concerned there's been a tremendous loss. And of course the poem by Stephen Dobyns in one of the first replies indicates this. We are all hurrying. But for what?

I don't think people, and it certainly seems like this book and this reviewer, slow down enough to say: wait a minute! What's the hurry? What have I just lost by being in such a hurry? What have I gained? How do they balance out?

If the book reviewed talked about that I'd be interested. If it just says speed is inevitable and here are some quick hints for dealing with it then I say no thanks.

Actually I was thinking more along the lines of the speed with which CDOs and other structured financial investments were created and sold, without anyone SLOWING DOWN enough to say, you know this sounds like a lot of BS to me..............

If you view Wall St. as nothing more than the ability to trade, then yes 'speed' has given more people the ability to trade quickly. But as a consequence it's also contributed to the substitution of speculation for investment (see John Bogle's new book, 'Enough'). Many people would say I think that speed has been the problem with Wall St. as well in speculation gaining the ascendancy over investment.

It looks so easy with our speedy tools: the price is $9.00 on my screen right here; 30 seconds later it's $9.95 on this screen here. So I sell. That is the Wall St. of day-traders and speed does help. It is not investment.

My guess is that in five years when there's been enough time to sort all of this out that people will say speculation was one of the biggest problems here. That and the abandonment of investment. For example do you buy a house as a long term investment, something that you live in for a long period of time. Or do you buy it for speculation, for a quick profit. I couldn't prove it but I think it's true that most of the speed that you say has been valuable for Wall St. was only valuable if you consider to be Wall St. a speculative entity rather than an investment one.

I think we do agree on panic though. It can move a whole lot more speedily now. I wouldn't be surprised in fact if the huge volatility swings that we see these days are more due to the speed of communication than to anything inherent in the market. But if so then that's one more instance where speed doesn't seem so good. Not that there's much that can be done about it.