A financial thriller that could have been so much better
Johnathan Pearce (London) Book reviews
Martin Baker, the UK journalist - he worked for several years at the International Herald Tribune in Paris as one of his stints - is someone who has realised that there is an untapped seam out there to be mined: thrillers about the world of finance. I have often myself wondered why, considering how much news is written about financial speculators these days, that there have not been more novels with speculators and the like as the main characters. There are some exceptions: there is Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of The Vanities; there is, of course, Ayn Rand's great celebration of capitalism in Atlas Shrugged, although the book is more about industry than money-lending. The novel Cash McCall is a neglected 1950s classic. Occasionally financiers feature in other novels but that is pretty much it. As for movies, ask anyone about a fictional presentation of a Wall Street speculator or City buyout king, and they will say Wall Street, with the glorious Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. And he was supposed to be a baddie, remember.
Mr Baker wants to plug a bit of a gap and he has written a thriller called Meltdown, which came out a little while ago. I picked up my signed copy and a few days ago, I read it. I am afraid I have to say the book comes as a bit of disappointment. If a movie is ever made out of it, it could be toe-curlingly embarrassing unless they sort out some of the plot and characters.
Without giving away a rambling plot, the protagonist is a brilliant young Oxford academic called Samuel Spendlove, who is persuaded to be employed by some shady media types to spy on a bank in Paris, to discover the doings of a proprietary trader who makes gazillions of dollars on deals, to report back on his affairs, and presumably, to bring said shady trader to book. What we get is what I might call the "misadventures of Samuel", a story of a once-innocent academic fallen among knaves. There are sex scenes so bad that I fear for Martin Baker's reputation. And they add nothing to the plot. There is a feeling that we need a least a bit of sex in there to clinch a movie deal for the novel. Much of the dialogue between the main characters is clunky and lacks believability. I have worked in finance and the media and can state without qualification that yes, there are some nasty pieces of work in both, but they do not talk as Martin Baker has them talking, at least not all the time.
Also, the plot does not make a lot of sense, and the central premise: that a single proprietary desk dealer and a few buddies can bring down not just a couple of other banks, but wipe out parts of the global economy, simply does not stand up to scrutiny, although it plays to the notion that bankers are "Masters of the Universe" with deep and dark powers. Of course, there can be spectacular blowups and we are witnessing some of that now, as the recent cases of Northern Rock and Bear Stearns prove, and as Barings and Long Term Capital Management did before it. But the idea that one private bank can cause a major recession seems over the top; to do that, they need the assistance, however unintended, of governments and central banks. For sure, in a thriller, a bit of licence is okay, but you need enough believability to carry the reader along. I do not think Mr Baker quite pulls this off.
Perhaps my biggest disappointment is not the credibility of the plot, but that the character of Spendlove is not quite convincing: he seems too gullible. I never quite believe that such a smart guy could let his media puppetmasters treat him like so badly. We never really find out what motivated his media controllers to act as they did. If I were Spendlove, I'd tell his bosses to get lost and go back to doing something more intelligent instead. He lacks depth; we do not really get to grips with what makes him tick as a character beyond a desire to get some excitement away from the academic world and earn pots of money.
There are good things about the novel, to be fair. Mr Baker knows how finance works or at least he knows about the jargon used around it; he has a good feel for what a dealing room looks like, how people in these places act and he sometimes gets the dialogue right. As a journalist, he has an excellent understanding of how markets move on rumours, how news services like Reuters or Dow Jones cover the news and how bankers' hours get elongated by time-zones. Some of the touches are a bit cliched, but the cliches do not grate too much.
Generally speaking, however, I rate this book as a two out of five, with five as the top score and one as poor. There is a great, contemporary novel to be written that has the doings of financiers at its core and which does not pander to the notion that moneymaking is a zero-sum game. Mr Baker does at least understand, to his credit, that there is a yawning gap in the arts world's treatment of finance. It is a bit of a shame that he has not really filled it. Maybe the next one will be better.
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2008/06/a_financial_thr.html
Tuesday, 10 June 2008
IHT/NYT identity crisis.
I'm a little confused, in the new order of the Global Edition of the NYT, who exactly works for who, and who gets to be called what. In particular I am talking about journalists.
New York Times journalists and IHT journalists are no longer distinguised within the paper. Yet online, articles by NYT journalists are clearly described as such, ditto articles by IHT journalists being described as being by IHT journalists.
Now we come to an Opinion piece run under the heading 'The Fulbright Seven'.
To quote it:
After reporting in The International Herald Tribune by Ethan Bronner drew high-level American attention, top State Department officials intervened to restore the students' Fulbright fellowships that lower-level functionaries had notified them would be withdrawn.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/08/opinion/edfulbright.php
Now, Ethan Bronner works for the NYT, not the IHT, so techincally, that would be 'after reporting in the NYT by Ethan Bronner'......
And if the IHT is the global edition of the NYT, why the misleading suggestion from the above piece that it was reporting in the IHT, as opposed to say the NYT, that resulted in the intervention of State.
Clearly, what we have here are some inconsistencies that need ironing out, but perhaps most baffling is why http://www.iht.com/ continues (to my mind usefully) to differentiate between NYT and IHT journalists, and the print edition doesn't.
And the ironing out is coming.
I was reflecting on a recent posting I made about how the BBC online news service offered two editions - a domestic one or an international one - , something of course that CNN does too, and I pondered why the NYT and IHT do not do the same. And if they did, would the international, or rather global edition of the NYT, take you to the IHT web site.
Well, I've been ruminating on this, and that just seems plain inconsistent, and in an age of remorseless cost cutting, what possible sense does it make for the same newspaper (the NYT) to run, maintain and develop two web sits - http://www.nytimes/ and http://www.iht.com/
Clearly it doesn't.
I'd say the smart money would be on the demise of http://www.iht.com/ in the coming 6-18 months.
So if you like http://www.iht.com/ (and I do, a lot) and you find the design of http://www.nytimes.com/ to be ugly, crowded and dated, then enjoy http://www.iht.com/ while you can.
The problem with Manhattan/American design sensibilities is that they just aren't very global. The graphics, typeface etc of http://www.iht.com/ is much more cosmopolitan, than the metropolitan, parochial, grey of http://www.nytimes.com/ But try telling that to a designer at http://www.nytimes.com/
Now, if http://www.iht.com/ were to be rolled into http://www.nytimes.com/ (and that's just purely a guess, based on logical thinking and an atmosphere of cost cutting - and http://www.iht.com/ is an easy hit), where do they go then with the IHT brand if it doesn't have an online presence?
I think they're going to ditch it. I think they believe if the IHT brand had value, it would have made money for them by now, so what's the benefit of keeping the legacy, and they're probably also considering the PR benefit of killing the IHT. (That's to say: lots of coverage.)
Sadly, that won't solve their problems.
I'm pragmatic. I don't care if the dingbat goes, I don't really care if the IHT brand goes, although I think they would run a real risk of losing a lot of their luxury and fashion advertising.
As a reader, what I want is a truly global newspaper, with no national bias or narrow editorial perspective. Being called the International NYT doesn't, per se, preclude that. But if they don't set that as their mission, as distinct to how they write for and edit for a U.S. audience, they can call it whatever they like, it won't fly globally.
From a business perspective however, I still think there is brand value in the IHT which the NYT haven't yet understood how they could leverage it. And it's all pretty obvious stuff.
http://www.ianwalthew.com/
http://www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com/
New York Times journalists and IHT journalists are no longer distinguised within the paper. Yet online, articles by NYT journalists are clearly described as such, ditto articles by IHT journalists being described as being by IHT journalists.
Now we come to an Opinion piece run under the heading 'The Fulbright Seven'.
To quote it:
After reporting in The International Herald Tribune by Ethan Bronner drew high-level American attention, top State Department officials intervened to restore the students' Fulbright fellowships that lower-level functionaries had notified them would be withdrawn.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/08/opinion/edfulbright.php
Now, Ethan Bronner works for the NYT, not the IHT, so techincally, that would be 'after reporting in the NYT by Ethan Bronner'......
And if the IHT is the global edition of the NYT, why the misleading suggestion from the above piece that it was reporting in the IHT, as opposed to say the NYT, that resulted in the intervention of State.
Clearly, what we have here are some inconsistencies that need ironing out, but perhaps most baffling is why http://www.iht.com/ continues (to my mind usefully) to differentiate between NYT and IHT journalists, and the print edition doesn't.
And the ironing out is coming.
I was reflecting on a recent posting I made about how the BBC online news service offered two editions - a domestic one or an international one - , something of course that CNN does too, and I pondered why the NYT and IHT do not do the same. And if they did, would the international, or rather global edition of the NYT, take you to the IHT web site.
Well, I've been ruminating on this, and that just seems plain inconsistent, and in an age of remorseless cost cutting, what possible sense does it make for the same newspaper (the NYT) to run, maintain and develop two web sits - http://www.nytimes/ and http://www.iht.com/
Clearly it doesn't.
I'd say the smart money would be on the demise of http://www.iht.com/ in the coming 6-18 months.
So if you like http://www.iht.com/ (and I do, a lot) and you find the design of http://www.nytimes.com/ to be ugly, crowded and dated, then enjoy http://www.iht.com/ while you can.
The problem with Manhattan/American design sensibilities is that they just aren't very global. The graphics, typeface etc of http://www.iht.com/ is much more cosmopolitan, than the metropolitan, parochial, grey of http://www.nytimes.com/ But try telling that to a designer at http://www.nytimes.com/
Now, if http://www.iht.com/ were to be rolled into http://www.nytimes.com/ (and that's just purely a guess, based on logical thinking and an atmosphere of cost cutting - and http://www.iht.com/ is an easy hit), where do they go then with the IHT brand if it doesn't have an online presence?
I think they're going to ditch it. I think they believe if the IHT brand had value, it would have made money for them by now, so what's the benefit of keeping the legacy, and they're probably also considering the PR benefit of killing the IHT. (That's to say: lots of coverage.)
Sadly, that won't solve their problems.
I'm pragmatic. I don't care if the dingbat goes, I don't really care if the IHT brand goes, although I think they would run a real risk of losing a lot of their luxury and fashion advertising.
As a reader, what I want is a truly global newspaper, with no national bias or narrow editorial perspective. Being called the International NYT doesn't, per se, preclude that. But if they don't set that as their mission, as distinct to how they write for and edit for a U.S. audience, they can call it whatever they like, it won't fly globally.
From a business perspective however, I still think there is brand value in the IHT which the NYT haven't yet understood how they could leverage it. And it's all pretty obvious stuff.
http://www.ianwalthew.com/
http://www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com/
More is Not More
On the subject of less is more, the thick newspaper that arrived in my postbox on Monday 9th June, had the dreaded promise, at an official paginagtion of 28 pages, of a very large sponsored section, or what the NYT has now decided should be called Advertising Supplements.
About Nigeria, it took up pages 17-24.
Naturally I, and I presume most IHT readers, didn't even scan it, let alone read it.
Back in the day they weren't afforded the 'status' of book pagination. That is to say, a seperate Roman Numeral pagination would be used, keeping in this case the 'official pagination' at 20 pages. Yet now these 8 pages of pap are given all the glory of a regular news page.
I don't much care for that.
Nor do I care for increasing sloppiness in not clearly identifying text rich advertisements as such. On page 7 was a very 'newsy' looking quater page about www.ruvr.ru - Voice of Russia. It should have been, in my humble opinion, tagged clearly as an advertisement. This type of thing used to SOP; less so now. I don't know why.
www.ianwalthew.com
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
About Nigeria, it took up pages 17-24.
Naturally I, and I presume most IHT readers, didn't even scan it, let alone read it.
Back in the day they weren't afforded the 'status' of book pagination. That is to say, a seperate Roman Numeral pagination would be used, keeping in this case the 'official pagination' at 20 pages. Yet now these 8 pages of pap are given all the glory of a regular news page.
I don't much care for that.
Nor do I care for increasing sloppiness in not clearly identifying text rich advertisements as such. On page 7 was a very 'newsy' looking quater page about www.ruvr.ru - Voice of Russia. It should have been, in my humble opinion, tagged clearly as an advertisement. This type of thing used to SOP; less so now. I don't know why.
www.ianwalthew.com
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
U.S. newspapers try a less is more approach
If you're feeling comfortable about the future of newspapers, read this piece.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/09/technology/zell.php
Is Sam Zell right about the U.S. newspaper business?
Last week, Zell, chairman and chief executive of Tribune, and Randy Michaels, chief operating officer, announced a set of deep cuts, saying that shrinking revenue left them no choice.
They said they would trim 500 pages of news each week from the company's dozen papers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times. Their aim is a paper with pages - excluding classified advertising and special ad sections - split 50-50 between news content and ads.
Journalists may recoil, but is a thinner, flashier, more local newspaper, with a smaller newsroom staff, the best financial model for an industry that is enduring a painful contraction with no end in sight?
Conversations with analysts and executives yielded an impassioned argument on that subject - it is a question they have asked themselves many times - but no consensus.
But watering down the product hurts staff morale, he said, and if taken too far, "could accelerate the migration of readers to the Web or other sources of news."
John Morton, an independent newspaper analyst, says he thinks that tipping point has already arrived at many papers.
"To the extent you diminish your product, I think you diminish your success, in print or online," he said. "In the long run, it's going to be harmful to newspapers' brand names, which is the strongest thing they've got."
As newspapers suffer through steep losses in circulation and advertising, Morton said, many of them have accelerated the process by offering readers less, trying to cut costs and preserve unrealistic profit margins. "It's a strategy, basically, of gradually closing down," he said.
When I read these types of articles, I have a strong sense that newspaper executives just don't have a strategy for survival, and that newspaper editors and journalists strategy for survival is to hope they get to a pensionable of buy out age.
www.ianwalthew.com
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/09/technology/zell.php
Is Sam Zell right about the U.S. newspaper business?
Last week, Zell, chairman and chief executive of Tribune, and Randy Michaels, chief operating officer, announced a set of deep cuts, saying that shrinking revenue left them no choice.
They said they would trim 500 pages of news each week from the company's dozen papers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times. Their aim is a paper with pages - excluding classified advertising and special ad sections - split 50-50 between news content and ads.
Journalists may recoil, but is a thinner, flashier, more local newspaper, with a smaller newsroom staff, the best financial model for an industry that is enduring a painful contraction with no end in sight?
Conversations with analysts and executives yielded an impassioned argument on that subject - it is a question they have asked themselves many times - but no consensus.
But watering down the product hurts staff morale, he said, and if taken too far, "could accelerate the migration of readers to the Web or other sources of news."
John Morton, an independent newspaper analyst, says he thinks that tipping point has already arrived at many papers.
"To the extent you diminish your product, I think you diminish your success, in print or online," he said. "In the long run, it's going to be harmful to newspapers' brand names, which is the strongest thing they've got."
As newspapers suffer through steep losses in circulation and advertising, Morton said, many of them have accelerated the process by offering readers less, trying to cut costs and preserve unrealistic profit margins. "It's a strategy, basically, of gradually closing down," he said.
When I read these types of articles, I have a strong sense that newspaper executives just don't have a strategy for survival, and that newspaper editors and journalists strategy for survival is to hope they get to a pensionable of buy out age.
www.ianwalthew.com
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
Monday, 9 June 2008
Who is Moon of Alabama? What IS the value of print?
I recently posted on a blogger who picked apart some issues concerning how the NYT explained oil price movements.
So who was this blogger and www.iht.com reader?
'Moon of Albama', AKA Jay, is of course a US citizen.
Here's what he wrote to me about the IHT:
"As a matter of fact, I do read IHT on line, and in April, when I was in the Netherlands, I'd pick it up daily to read on the train. (I was following the Democratic primaries.) Yeah, it's a great paper. When I lived in London, I subscribed to the print edition; it was one of my links to "home," but gave me news of Europe, too."
So from an advertising perspective, not an ideal candidate for the print story, and an exact template for any agency who says the IHT is read by US expats/travellers who want to keep in touch with home - but perhaps a great profile for the online ad sell, if only the IHT knew, or anyone knew, who the hell Jay actually was and what he did.
With online readers coming through the side door, with no registration, even if it is free, what can the IHT sell? Unique visitors, usual online advertising BS, where they are from and some probably rather weak online surveys of www.iht.com readers.
Click-through then, surely, is only the way sites like www.iht.com will eventually be able to sell advertising on, just like Google. I'm just not convinced there's enough money in that, on the volumes a site like www.iht.com can offer. So that leads us to the question of click through and client contact or even conversion. Tricky. Glad I'm not selling advertising for iht.com.
As of right now IHT advertising can't say much more than 'readers of www.iht.com' are like Moon of Alabama', who is actually called Jay.
Knowing the first names of one's readers isn't much use in a pitch.
I guess the question for everyone is, as ever: what's the model, stupid?
According to Krugman everything that can be digitized will be given away for free, sooner or later. What if that's to include online advertising? Now I am confused.
Personally, I'm not yet buying the premise that the future of newspapers is online. Way too soon to call that one, not because people won't read them online, but because they haven't cracked the revenue nut.
I'd be working on those print strategies myself. At least for a while. Because what can't be digitized is the 'value of print' as a user experience.
What SDJ needs to work out for the IHT is how to augment 'the value of print' of the IHT print product.
What can print give the reader that online or Kindle can't?
What IS the value of print?
I've a few ideas on this.
http://www.ianwalthew.com/
http://www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com/
So who was this blogger and www.iht.com reader?
'Moon of Albama', AKA Jay, is of course a US citizen.
Here's what he wrote to me about the IHT:
"As a matter of fact, I do read IHT on line, and in April, when I was in the Netherlands, I'd pick it up daily to read on the train. (I was following the Democratic primaries.) Yeah, it's a great paper. When I lived in London, I subscribed to the print edition; it was one of my links to "home," but gave me news of Europe, too."
So from an advertising perspective, not an ideal candidate for the print story, and an exact template for any agency who says the IHT is read by US expats/travellers who want to keep in touch with home - but perhaps a great profile for the online ad sell, if only the IHT knew, or anyone knew, who the hell Jay actually was and what he did.
With online readers coming through the side door, with no registration, even if it is free, what can the IHT sell? Unique visitors, usual online advertising BS, where they are from and some probably rather weak online surveys of www.iht.com readers.
Click-through then, surely, is only the way sites like www.iht.com will eventually be able to sell advertising on, just like Google. I'm just not convinced there's enough money in that, on the volumes a site like www.iht.com can offer. So that leads us to the question of click through and client contact or even conversion. Tricky. Glad I'm not selling advertising for iht.com.
As of right now IHT advertising can't say much more than 'readers of www.iht.com' are like Moon of Alabama', who is actually called Jay.
Knowing the first names of one's readers isn't much use in a pitch.
I guess the question for everyone is, as ever: what's the model, stupid?
According to Krugman everything that can be digitized will be given away for free, sooner or later. What if that's to include online advertising? Now I am confused.
Personally, I'm not yet buying the premise that the future of newspapers is online. Way too soon to call that one, not because people won't read them online, but because they haven't cracked the revenue nut.
I'd be working on those print strategies myself. At least for a while. Because what can't be digitized is the 'value of print' as a user experience.
What SDJ needs to work out for the IHT is how to augment 'the value of print' of the IHT print product.
What can print give the reader that online or Kindle can't?
What IS the value of print?
I've a few ideas on this.
http://www.ianwalthew.com/
http://www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com/
Pearl Lam is an IHT fan
A Life in the Day: Pearl Lam
Lam, a powerful player on China’s fashionable art scene, is the daughter of the late Hong Kong business tycoon Lim Por-yen. Single, she runs her art export business from her penthouse in Shanghai and her homes in Hong Kong and London.
"I get up around 7.30. My Filipino housekeeper, Venus, wakes me — unless I get up before her, then I’ll wake her up. I live on the top floor — the 22nd — of a building my family built a few years ago in the French Concession district of Shanghai. It’s beautiful. My room looks out onto a tropical landscaped garden, so the first thing I see in the morning is a Chinese pavilion, lots of bamboo, lotus flowers, plum blossoms, banana plants, magnolia, and a pond where I put my big goldfish for good feng shui.
I love the energy of Shanghai. It’s very cultural, unlike Hong Kong, which is sophisticated but a cultural desert. I never used to want to live here — it was too near Hong Kong, my mother’s home, and I wanted to be free from familial obligations and pressure. But I love it now. It’s taught me how to be Chinese.
I normally check my e-mails in bed and read the online editions of the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. "
http://flyingmonkeys.cn/
www.ianwalthew.com
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
Lam, a powerful player on China’s fashionable art scene, is the daughter of the late Hong Kong business tycoon Lim Por-yen. Single, she runs her art export business from her penthouse in Shanghai and her homes in Hong Kong and London.
"I get up around 7.30. My Filipino housekeeper, Venus, wakes me — unless I get up before her, then I’ll wake her up. I live on the top floor — the 22nd — of a building my family built a few years ago in the French Concession district of Shanghai. It’s beautiful. My room looks out onto a tropical landscaped garden, so the first thing I see in the morning is a Chinese pavilion, lots of bamboo, lotus flowers, plum blossoms, banana plants, magnolia, and a pond where I put my big goldfish for good feng shui.
I love the energy of Shanghai. It’s very cultural, unlike Hong Kong, which is sophisticated but a cultural desert. I never used to want to live here — it was too near Hong Kong, my mother’s home, and I wanted to be free from familial obligations and pressure. But I love it now. It’s taught me how to be Chinese.
I normally check my e-mails in bed and read the online editions of the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. "
http://flyingmonkeys.cn/
www.ianwalthew.com
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
If only Think! were the official blog for readers of the IHT
A 'drunken expat' [ http://bart-calendar.livejournal.com/ ] is happy to have been linked to www.ihtreaders.blogspot.com, writing
that 'the official blog for readers of the International Herald Tribune is linking to me today'.
I'd like to say it was official. It's very much not.
I think it would be great if it was an intergral part of www.iht.com but I am not sure they are quite confident enough in their own skin for such a maverick beast in their belly.
But it does bring up the question of why not? There are are many devoted IHT fans worldwide who I believe would enjoy a forum to praise and keep 'their paper' on their toes, complain too (let's not forget that most letters of complaint are neither published nor even passed onto the publisher or marketing director, addressed in large part as they are to the editor), but haven't found this blog.
The question is, how to reach them?
Certainly a daily free house advertisement in the IHT would help, as would a prominent link on www.iht.com
It would require them to respect the editorial independence of this blog, and to trust me that I, and their readers, have their best interests at heart. Which I don't think is too big an ask.
Incidentally, the drunken expat writes that being quoted on this blog was 'more of a response he received from the IHT', which brings to mind two questions.
1. How many letters of complaint from IHT readers did the IHT receive about the change of the masthead and what did they say; what was the majority consensus?
If any IHT insider can give Think! a steer on this, it would be appreciated.
2. Why wouldn't the editor of the IHT take the time to reply to someone who is clearly a loyal reader? (Even if he is a drunken American expat in Montpellier and hardly whom the IHT's advertisers are trying to reach - or perhaps they are, if he is a trustafarian and has a taste for luxury goods.)
One can generally say that for every letter of complaint a newspaper receives on a given subject, there are at least 10 other readers who didn't write.
My guess is that they didn't get too many letters of complaint on this, and this may encourage them to think further about which brand to move forward with...
www.ianwalthew.com
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
that 'the official blog for readers of the International Herald Tribune is linking to me today'.
I'd like to say it was official. It's very much not.
I think it would be great if it was an intergral part of www.iht.com but I am not sure they are quite confident enough in their own skin for such a maverick beast in their belly.
But it does bring up the question of why not? There are are many devoted IHT fans worldwide who I believe would enjoy a forum to praise and keep 'their paper' on their toes, complain too (let's not forget that most letters of complaint are neither published nor even passed onto the publisher or marketing director, addressed in large part as they are to the editor), but haven't found this blog.
The question is, how to reach them?
Certainly a daily free house advertisement in the IHT would help, as would a prominent link on www.iht.com
It would require them to respect the editorial independence of this blog, and to trust me that I, and their readers, have their best interests at heart. Which I don't think is too big an ask.
Incidentally, the drunken expat writes that being quoted on this blog was 'more of a response he received from the IHT', which brings to mind two questions.
1. How many letters of complaint from IHT readers did the IHT receive about the change of the masthead and what did they say; what was the majority consensus?
If any IHT insider can give Think! a steer on this, it would be appreciated.
2. Why wouldn't the editor of the IHT take the time to reply to someone who is clearly a loyal reader? (Even if he is a drunken American expat in Montpellier and hardly whom the IHT's advertisers are trying to reach - or perhaps they are, if he is a trustafarian and has a taste for luxury goods.)
One can generally say that for every letter of complaint a newspaper receives on a given subject, there are at least 10 other readers who didn't write.
My guess is that they didn't get too many letters of complaint on this, and this may encourage them to think further about which brand to move forward with...
www.ianwalthew.com
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
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