It's embarrassing that a newspaper that published a brilliant deconstruction of trend pieces ("Now, Less Than Ever", Samuel Jacobs and Jonathan Liu), still puts out this kind of pabulum. At least Floppy Woo was funny. This reads like a bunch of bitter, entitled, anonymous people trying to rationalize their failures in a piece that is itself a rationalization of its own failures. If there were any numbers or statistics even remotely associated with this bogus trend piece it might be worth discussing, but it's just empty and lazy.

And almost all magazines still have expense accounts. Honor thy father and all, but things haven't changed as much as Mr. Talese seems to think. And "tape recorders" have gotten considerably more portable for field reporting.