Another buck slip/order form and BRE in a #10 OE arrived yesterday.
This one came from the NY Times and it’s more or less exactly the same as recent mailings from all kinds of magazines like Fortune, Time, Money, Newsweek.
I’ve finally figured out why none of these august publications bother with letter, brochure or lift note: they have nothing to say about anything, including themselves.
The Times (and, to a lesser extent, Newsweek and Time) has a real problem in direct mail: no matter how brilliant their list strategy, at least 50% of the mailings are going to land with a klunk in the mailboxes of people who hate their guts.
For at least 75 years, the Times has been printing flat out lies in stories that sing the glories of communism (Walter Duranty reporting on Stalin’s Russia), furiously florid fawning over commies (Herbert Matthews reporting on and interviewing Castro), making stuff up (Jayson Blair in just about everything he wrote), printing all the latest news about the US’s top secret weapons in the war on terror (the whole damned rag), and generally behaving as if the paper’s owners were in the employ of whoever’s the country’s enemy du jour.
I guess they think we haven’t noticed.
The Times has one of the oddest business models of all time: their target audience is people who read newspapers. In general, that’s older white guys. Older white guys tend not to be left wing dopes.
And yet the Times keeps flying along on one wing, the wrong one for its business.