MEDIA WATCH: Ready, Net, Go
You wouldn’t know the Dalai Lama was in town the weekend of Aug. 14, even though The New York Times all but dubbed him the celebrity flavor of the month. Coverage of his three-day event took up fewer column inches than e-commerce did in the venerable daily.
On Saturday, Aug. 14, Serge Schmemann waxed philosophic in Think Tank. The piece, called “On the Internet, Balancing Free Flow of Data and Profits,” noted that “Not surprisingly, supporters of the [two]bills [dealing with data privacy and data piracy] have divided into those who largely use data and those who largely sell it.”
The Times’ quick editorial mind then hacked its way to the not-surprising conclusion. Schmemann quoted a lawyer representing the Online Banking Association: “It’s not the piracy, or the fear that we’ll lose the incentive to invest in data,” he said. “It’s that those who have information can make a lot more money.”
If the Times didn’t quite redeem itself with its article on L.L. Bean in the same issue, at least it didn’t embarrass itself with stale news. Here the focus was on what the 87-year-old cataloger is doing to stay in business, from opening retail stores to revamping its Web site. Horror that L.L. Bean is tinkering with the design of its hunting boot marred a solid recap of where the company is today and its plans for the future, with e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar stores in particular.
However, the Aug. 15 Sunday Styles section went into a rant about luxury, using a pillow from The Company Store’s new spinoff, the Pillow Source Book, as a point of departure.
“You can buy cashmere-upholstered mattresses from Dial-a-Mattress, 16th-century fountains on the Internet from Millionaire .com or crystal-studded Wonderbras from Victoria’s Secret. And a $2,300 pillow from my favorite heretofore midprice catalog,” cried Penelope Green in “The $2,300 Pillow and the Mass Marketing of Luxury.”
The article – admittedly as close to a humor piece as the Times is likely to publish – swings between swipes at the sorts of high-priced items one can buy via direct response and questions why anyone would want to spend that kind of money on a pillow. We’ll ignore errors such as the fact that “Wonderbra” is a trademark of Bali, not Victoria’s Secret (which markets the Miracle Bra) and assume that Green just isn’t a member of the Pillow Source’s target audience.
