Comments on: Elizabeth Spiers and the reinvented New York Observer

By: toaster1941

toaster1941 — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:15:11 +0000

Hi I am an old fart who has subscribed to the physical paper for a few years. The paper has some interesting attributes, and is becoming less about stupid real estate transactions than the NYC Web scene, about which I am ignorant.
My only problem with the Observer is that some really good writers have gone missing – not Candace Bushnell, who has been gone for years, but Mike Thomas, the ex:Lehman curmudgeon and Simon Doonan, the Barney’s window man. If the good writers all go (and so far they haven’t) then I will too. Jim Hanbury

By: lukobe

lukobe — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 21:06:43 +0000

If your description of the site is correct, why would I want to spend time reading it? Dull writing and linkbait listicles? I can get that almost anywhere.

By: LES_crabby

LES_crabby — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:03:54 +0000

I can’t speak to any insider-y stuff but as for the Observer seeming “under-edited and rather lightweight” . . . that has been its reputation for years and years, no? The last time I mentioned something about it to a friend he said “it’s a paper for rich people who aren’t that smart.” Which I totally agreed with. Neither of us work in media or even know particularly many people who do. It’s not rocket science to notice such things.

One more thing, I think it’s gratuitously self-mythologizing to say the domain name was “snaffled by a dilettantish New York weekly before it could be claimed by the venerable newspaper in England” — didn’t most UK papers use co.uk addresses rather than .com? I think probably now most of them own both, but that’s a pretty recent thing.

By: ElizabethSpiers

ElizabethSpiers — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:55:36 +0000

Felix: I don’t really mind the backhanded compliments or the fact that you purport to judge my fitness as a print editor by looking at the website (and gleefully admitting that you don’t actually read the print version.) If you think it’s okay to review the book without reading it, I guess that’s your business.

But some fact-checking is in order: When I started at the NYO, the NYO sites were getting a little under 890K uniques a month. In December, they were getting 2.1M. Is that where I think it should be? No. But that’s pretty good on the improvement front. What you see above is traffic only for Observer.com–and even then, we’re not properly tagged, which should be blindingly obvious by the apparent two months in 2010 where it appears that the Observer got zero traffic. I don’t begrudge you using quantcast, even if it’s inaccurate because everyone does and it’s reasonable. But you acknowledged that we spun out verticals on the site and don’t seem to think it’s reasonable to include them in your analysis. Or maybe that it’s just inconvenient. But regardless, it’s inaccurate.

By: TFF

TFF — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:54:27 +0000

“I don’t ever trade the markets: all of my investments are strictly buy-and-hold, with a time horizon measured in decades.”

You might remind people of this when seeming to give them bad advice?