Some events come as a shock to the system, even as they don’t especially surprise. Bill Kristol’s unceremonious sacking — “This is William Kristol’s last column.” — was such an event. Sure, Memeorandum filled up with commentary in the 24 hours after said last column was published, but this came as no surprise. Even Kristol himself had telegraphed indifference about whether his one-year contract would be renewed.
And so begins another search for another voice somewhere to the right of at least David Brooks.* That is, assuming the Times even chooses to do so: the Times had no self-identified conservative columnist for a number of years before hiring Brooks and it’s not necessarily a given that another will be hired on. Libertarian John Tierney himself spent a few months on the op-ed page before deciding he’d rather write about science anyway. If we’re judging by Kristol’s tour, the Times needs to scratch a bit deeper and find a voice from someone not standing in line for the Acela Express.
I’m reminded of the Times’ decision a few years back to move its opinion columnists behind a pay wall, an experiment called TimesSelect that proved to be mercifully brief. I suppose the idea was that because Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd et. al. were the Times’ most familiar faces they were therefore its the most valuable asset, which people would pay for. They assumed wrong, and in fact got it exactly backward. Newsgathering and reporting is still newspapers’ “killer app” and if anything, the Times should have been charging for that**; meanwhile, the value of opinion journalism has been in free fall since approximately 2001. There are many pundits who arose in the blogosphere, without first working in journalism (although some were later acquired). Kevin Drum, Ed Morrissey, Bob Somerby, Rick Moran, Jim Henley, Megan McArdle, Glenn Greenwald and Steven Den Beste come to mind.
So maybe the New York Times should be looking out into the blogosphere for its next columnist. Aziz Poonwalla, himself a veteran blogger, had the same idea already and has put a recommendation to it:
I am of course biased because he is my friend, but I think that Joshua Treviño meets and exceeds the criteria above and would in fact be the ideal advocate for the conservative movement in the Obama era. Josh was a speechwriter for the Bush Administration, served in the Army, and had a brief stint at the Pacific Research Institute, a mid-level conservative think tank. Josh was one of the original conservative bloggers, including founding RedState.com (though no longer associated with them). He currently is running his own media consultant firm, and has had numerous media appearances on television and guest columns at National Review.
Seriously, why not? Although I should note that I count myself as a friend of Treviño’s as well, I think this is an excellent suggestion. Poonwalla mentions Treviño as “one of the original conservative bloggers” but doesn’t elaborate, so I will. Treviño was the proprietor of Tacitus.org, an intellectually conservative-minded blog that somehow managed to attract a left-leaning readership. I’d think the New York Times would have to consider that a real advantage. He is not widely known at present, sure, but that can be chalked up as merely an accident of him not writing for the New York Times. Not yet, anyway.
To those who say: “Who cares about the New York Times?” I say: I’m sure it feels good to say, but that’s no reason to abandon a chance to tell your story. And to those who say the Times is doomed anyway, I say: there are other things the New York Times can learn from the web, but those will have to wait for another post.
*And it would be perhaps uncharitable of me to note that I found Brooks rather more interesting in The Atlantic and Weekly Standard, where he had freedom to devote more time and resources to a topic, but I don’t mean to be uncharitable.
**I forget who suggested a temporary pay wall for news, such that corporate and institutional subscribers would pay to get the news first and then all the rest of us free riders could read it later, but it made sense. Reporting is expensive, so get a return on it.
