pampelmoose Dave Allen of Gang of Four’s Music and Media Blog

I was pleased to be the guest this morning of Ruby Receptionist’s President, Jill Nelson, at the Portland Business Alliance breakfast and awards show. Jill won an award for being a small business owner who’s company added new employees and achieved phenomenal growth in 2005. These breakfast’s can be quite dull affairs if you are not actually winning awards but today’s guest speaker was none other than Bill Keller executive editor of the New York Times.
I think Keller was wondering how and why he’d been invited; I was wondering this too given that most small business owners lean somewhat to the right in their politics and the NY Times has been the recipient of, as Keller succinctly put it, “pointed emails from both the right and the low.” He put up a spirited defence of the paper’s position on the Iraq war (judging it neither moral nor immoral,) and he offered his mea culpa over the paper’s handling of the run up to the war and it’s inability to see through the administration’s smokescreens at the time. Most interesting to me were his comments about the print media’s battle with the internet and it’s declining circulation and advertising revenues (although the Times has managed to succeed in both those areas unlike most papers.) His position was simple and his example very telling; the Times will survive because “unlike all the online pundits, armchair bloggers and search engines” the Times is able to maintain a bureau in Baghdad, at a cost of $3 million a year, and therefore offer up the most insightful reporting of the war from the ground - unlike the aforementioned online entities.” And to that I tip my hat.