Media watchers received the story like a Christmas present, tearing off the wrapping to get at the goods. The fun began on Twitter, after the story went online but well before its print publication. X tweeted “NYTimes does a trend piece on .....It is about as good/bad as it sounds.” (No one ever said the Internet was good at nuance; the wags ignored that the short piece was tucked inside the section, treating it instead as if it were front-page screaming-headline news.)
By the next morning, The Washington Post had taken it up even adding an official statement from Z. And soon, other media sites had chimed in, including New York magazine’s entertaining piece on Cli-Stuy neighborhood.
The reporter Lois Beckett, from the investigative reporting outfit ProPublica, even brought Big Data to bear on the trend, posting a tongue-in-cheek survey about CF sightings.
But why, I’ve been wondering, does The Times do so many of these pieces? How do they come up with them? And how do editors react when they are mocked?
Advertisement
I asked the Styles editor, Stuart Emmrich, to fill me in. (Not all trend pieces run in Styles, of course; they may appear in Dining, Real Estate and even on the news pages.)
“I try to stay away from ‘trend’ stories in favor of what I call ‘snapshots’ — pieces, sometimes inside quick hits (usually in the Noted column) and sometimes cover stories, that give a window into the lives of some of our readers,” he told me. It’s what he likes to call “the journalism of recognition,” he says — “sometimes to the eye rolls of my staff.”
Some of the ideas come from freelance pitches, as the cf column did.
“But most often they come from a Monday morning meeting with my staff where I open with a very specific question: What did you do, see, listen to, read or talk to friends about this weekend? Is there a story there?”
As for his reaction when articles are criticized, Mr. Emmrich rolls with the punches: “If it comes directly from a reader, I try to respond thoughtfully and respectfully. If it comes from a blog or some other site, I read it, usually chuckle (especially if it is a well-written attack) and then move on.”
With its large staff, great variety of sections and considerable resources, The Times has room on its diverse menu not only for coverage of world crises and global economic trends, but for lighter fare: book and restaurant reviews, theater coverage and, apparently, a full consideration of new literary genres.
While The Times’s declarations of trends can sometimes seem self-serious, overblown and out-of-touch, they also can — at their best — provoke moments of recognition and lively conversation. And because they occasionally provide a full day’s worth of hilarity, let’s pray that they never go away.