NY Times Honcho Bill Keller Is The New King Of The Link-Bait Whores

About a week ago, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller dished out a rare tweet from his Twitter page: “#TwitterMakesYouStupid. discuss.” Naturally, the internet’s intelligensia jumped all over Keller for embodying the stereotype of the old fogey newsman, a media dinosaur who longs for the the era of typewriters and fedora-wearing men and soda fountains, someone who just doesn’t get it.

And now he’s followed that up with a full blown “GET OFF MY LAWN!”  essay in the New York Times in which he goes on and on about how social media is melting our brains, etc. — you’ve probably heard it before, and there may even be something to it, but that’s neither here nor there right now. Then he follows that up by admitting that he gets a rush out of seeing links to things he wrote getting passed around on Twitter, and sort of vaguely and shamelessly begs readers to channel their outrage by tweeting links to his piece and ranting about how stupid he is.

I realize I am inviting blowback from passionate Tweeters, from aging academics who stoke their charisma by overpraising every novelty and from colleagues at The Times who are refining a social-media strategy to expand the reach of our journalism. So let me be clear that Twitter is a brilliant device — a megaphone for promotion, a seine for information, a helpful organizing tool for everything from dog-lover meet-ups to revolutions. It restores serendipity to the flow of information. Though I am not much of a Tweeter and pay little attention to my Facebook account, I love to see something I’ve written neatly bitly’d and shared around the Twittersphere, even when I know — now, for instance — that the verdict of the crowd will be hostile.

Keller’s like a submissive who goes into see a dominatrix and insists, “Oh I hate spankings…now please spank the sh*t out of me.” Hey, traffic’s been down dramatically since the New York Times instituted a paywall, so they’ve got to do SOMETHING! And just for that, I refuse to link to Keller’s piece, on principle. I’m sure you can find it if you’re really dying to read it.

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