NYT biz coverage of NYT lacking

Yvette Kantrow, the executive editor of The Deal, takes a shot at the New York Times business section coverage of the parent company’s announcement that it might close the Boston Globe.

Kantrow writes, “The Times story wasn’t only brief and buried; it was completely anodyne and carried an obligatory ‘no comment’ from Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Other outlets weren’t as restrained. The Washington Post in a brief story Saturday called the Globe death threat ‘a striking example of corporate hardball.’ Tell us how you really feel. The Associated Press, meanwhile, banged out more than 800 words on the news and argued that it meant ‘no paper is safe.’

“The Globe, of course, revisited the story on Sunday, and by Monday, a piece on the Times Co.’s tactics could also be found in The Wall Street Journal.

“The Times itself, however, remained mum — an omission made all the more glaring by the fact that on Mondays, the paper famously devotes a chunk of its business section to coverage of the media industry. Today, that mostly consisted of a David Carr column on an HBO series on post-Katrina New Orleans, a piece on Disney’s Pixar animation studio and briefs on developments at FoxNews.com and at NY1. Whatever. But the possible closing of a storied, 137-year-old newspaper by one of the most storied newspaper families didn’t even warrant a mention. So much for all the news that’s fit to print.”

Read more here.