Memo to Jeff Bercovici: What’s with Jim Surowiecki’s column in this week’s
New Yorker? It’s right
there on the website – complete with no fewer than nineteen
hyperlinks. (Someone give this guy a blog!) But it’s in the "online only"
section: if you pick up the actual magazine, it skips straight from the Talk
of the Town section to the feature well, which means that Surowiecki’s "Financial
Page" is a page only in metaphor.
The most charitable explanation I can think of is that the New Yorker decided
the column was simply too reliant on its hyperlinks to work in print. But if
that’s the case, why didn’t they just ask Surowiecki to write a different column,
or to rewrite this one so that it worked in print form? Could this be the point
at which the New Yorker’s editors decided that an article on the website would
get just as many readers as an article in the magazine? (I doubt that’s true,
but you never know.) And in any case, given that Surowiecki is writing for a
print magazine, not a website, how come he filed a column so hyperlink-heavy
in the first place?
I can’t remember Surowiecki ever being banished from the print edition like
this before, which is why it’s so bittersweet to read this,
from Mark Thoma:
I am very pleased to see this, and not just because there’s a link to this
site. I’ve been frustrated with the press on the ‘Laffer curve, tax cuts have
paid for themselves’ issue because the press has enabled a big lie. It’s a
lie Republican candidates, even the president, can still repeat with very
little attention from the mainstream media. No matter how often reputable
economists on the right and the left have said this is a lie, the press has
ignored it and allowed it to continue unquestioned.
He’s writing, of course, about Surowiecki’s column, which is about supply-side
economics. And it turns out that the one time he singles out "the press"
for praise in exposing the lie is also the one time that the article remains
unprinted by any physical press.
Update: Both Surowiecki and Blake Eskin, the New
Yorker’s web editor, respond in the comments. Apparently this is the second
in an occasional series of web-only columns, which will appear in some weeks
when the print column doesn’t appear.