Gray Lady Down

Lights on, nobody home.

Strangest thing happened yesterday. I don’t usually get much help from other nosey people in finding material to write about. Usually, I just make it up for myself. But UPS made a surprise delivery here yesterday with a fat envelope containing a bunch of photographs and a small breast pocket notepad containing hand-scrawled sentence fragments keyed to the photos. So I’m sharing what I have, although there’s not much I can confirm in the way you’re supposed to do it.

My source seems to be claiming that the New York Times as we have known it is gone, purchased by a third party, repurposed, and moved from its current location to another headquarters building. Still in New York City but no longer in the high-rent district.

Until a few weeks ago, the derelict brownstone had been vacant for years. The 

new owners have done a high-speed rehab just sufficient to resume publishing.

I can hear all the questions now. Who bought them? Why does the NYT give every appearance of being a going concern at the same old address? If it’s true they’ve been acquired, what’s next?

Patience, please. Word is, this has been in the works for quite a while. You may recall the recent flap about The Onion’s attempt to buy the Infowars radio network founded by Alex Jones. That truncated transaction may have been a dry run for this one. Rumor has it that the real predators here are The Boobylon Hive and a mysterious foreign entity that goes by the name of Fabiano Gold, Limited.  In seeming confirmation of this story, the UPS package contained a photograph of the advance lump sum paid to close the deal.

There is no information provided about the actual dollar value of this pile of gold pieces. 

But does anyone remember how much Time, Newsweek, and Atlantic Monthly received in 

hard 

cash when they handed over their 

shares to outsiders? Nobody I asked about this 

knew or cared how much.

The plan has been long in the making, according to the scribbled notes in the UPS packet. The publisher and the senior editors wanted out of the dying carcass of the Gray Lady. What they wanted instead, like every media personality who had an Ivy roommate majoring in Economics, was gold and plenty of it. 

They had known for years that all the defense of Bidenomics, and before that Obamanomics, foisted on the Times readership by Nobelist(?) Paul Krugman was a lie. (Why do you think he got fired before this deal went down?) They covered their intended escape by commissioning poll after poll showing first Biden, then Harris ahead in the presidential race. They said all the things people expected them to say, including the ‘Trump is Hitler’ wheeze and reused all the same boilerplate lies about MAGA and its leader they already had continuously on file, each and every one of them on smart keys of their laptops.

Meanwhile, the editors and their favored reporters used all the time they were saving by not reporting on anything that was happening to write all the news and Op-Ed copy the paper could be expected to publish in the first six months of the Trump administration. Enough of a head start to get a sexy new lady up and running in the new streamlined media world already ruled by TikTok, TMZ, and the succubi of the New York Post, which was at least selling newspapers. 

The good news is that they managed to keep the hollowing out of the old New York Times a secret from all the reporters who were not reporting for the Alphabet TV news organizations and the hundreds of Times clonettes whose workload had consisted for years of plagiarizing headlines and news copy from the Paper of Record in New York.

The bad news was that there wasn’t nearly as much money behind the acquiring firms as they’d been led to believe. Specifics of the timeline for the relaunching of the Times are not provided by the notepad. What we have instead are the photos in the packet and words that  amount to provocative captions instead of real information.

You’ve already seen the new headquarters building, so you must suspect that all is not well in the relocated enterprise. Here’s the Main Entrance, if we can call it that.

The greeter out front used to be chief copy editor of Jennifer Rubin and Maureen Dowd, 

but neither of these ladies has written a word of new copy since Biden became President.

He’s happy to have a job at this point, which is sad because he was at Columbia with “O”.

There is still an office (of sorts) for the last Sulzberger to rule the roost.

He doesn’t allow visitors or close approaches these days. The only person who claims to be in 

regular contact with him now is the President. Not long ago, Biden recounted the time the two 

of them had broken into Mar A Lago to steal Melania’s panties. We knew somebody had, but 

who could have guessed it was these two eminent graybeards disporting themselves on a lark?

There is also, of course, a portrait of the elderly Publisher in the entry hall of the new home of Times, Inc. 

It’s tradition. It is what it is. Like most things.

Lest you feel some concern that the ship of the Times might need a new captain, rest assured that there is one. The Chief Executive Officer of the revamped publication has an open door policy and meets with employees from time to time as the need arises.

Tanganyika Brszinsky was born the son of a lavishly praised diplomat who worked for the United States 

in the latter half of his life. Tanganyika (still Tango in those years) graduated from Vassar with a minor 

in minor English writers before receiving a Masters degree from the Harvard Business School. After 

that came a career at the Times, with a detour to secure her gender advancement and an anorexia cure.

Thus far, Ms. Brszinsky has presided over publication of the first three issues of the reformatted and redirected mission (“All the News that Fits” ) of a physically more congenial size and length. Assisting her in this prodigious innovation and pioneering effort are a hand-picked editorial board boasting both veteran and new members of staff.

The Editorial Board enjoying one of its informal colloquia in the refurbished Common Room.

The Common Room was used exclusively for board meetings during development of the first issues of the reimagined Times. The more formal Board Room required more redesign and rehab work before it could be brought on line. When funds are available, it was also to be equipped with state-of-the-art computer equipment and other gizmos of a technological sort. Until then, meetings will, as always, succeed on the basis of the massive brainpower possessed by the editors.

You can see that much as been accomplished to date in the new Board Room. The lady on the left

Is the Personal Assistant and Secretary to Tanganyika (who “could not live without her”) Desirée

DuPonti is an alumna of the university attended by Mr. Sulzberger’s many top-drawer secretaries.

There is also a well equipped break room served by a chef who sous’ed under a White House chef in the Obama administration. 

Pierre Dommage has been instrumental in updating the nutritional content of the climate-friendly ectomorphic foodstuffs enjoyed by Times employees since the reorganization, and indeed his 

credentials are so superior that he is serving as the Food Editor pro-tem of the rejuvenated Times.

The many physical tasks involved in producing a weekly newspaper are demanding indeed. Technology deficits have been noted above, but due to uncanny good fortune the building the Times acquired had a superbly tuned Linotype machine in the basement where the staff discovered it while looking for the furnace. 

It has been readjusted to meet the new demands of a modern newspaper.

Just as fortunately, a surviving former secretary of Mr. Sulzberger had once been on friendly terms with is a master Linotype operator who came out of retirement to bridge the gap between the technology on layaway and what was presently available. He has done yeoman service in this regard, working night and day and then night again on many occasions.

Mr. Smith, as I’ll call him (his name isn’t mentioned in the notes) 

is ill at the moment but expected back very soon. He’s needed.

The printing part isn’t too difficult because long-standing connections through the old Times union workers enabled a deal to be struck with USA Today for the actual printing of limited runs of the first three issues. Only limited runs were required because the fleet of delivery vehicles is still being assembled and refitted for newspaper distribution.

Progress is being made. All that can be said at the moment.

Despite the usual startup issues, the new mission of the newspaper is being met. As stated above, three issues have been released in public thus far.

The hard copies of the issues fresh off the press were not included in the 

UPS packet. The photographs are presumed to be accurate.

The Second Issue. They say. No volume or issue numbers

Were printed in the initial runs, due to delivery-date factors.

Third Issue. Status not entirely clear. There are some issues with the NYT morgue.

About that morgue matter. The two issues that were included in the UPS parcel were both significantly deteriorated, possibly with mold. In the interest of honesty, here are photographs of what actual papers were included in the delivery.

Hmmm? Still some questions to be answered apparently.

Well, that’s all we’ve got to go on for now. I’m sure they’ll win their way through to the end by the end of this story though. They’re used to winning and don’t see how they could possibly lose. What do you think?

One last anecdote from the notes. There was mention of the fact that no matter where you went at HQ, somehow this song always seemed to be playing. Think that means anything?

Oh. One final thing. This was a picture included at the very bottom of the stack. On the back of it, a scribble claimed that the old homeless man had been hired to scrub the graffiti but got mugged and lost his  brush. Who knows how things like that happen in the Big Apple?