by Patrick Appel
James Surowiecki joins Felix Salmon in bashing Blodget:
...the problem with Blodget’s plan isn’t just the obvious onenamely, that it’ll reduce the Times to a collection of stories about sex and cute animals. It’s also that it’ll leave the newspaper ill equipped to cover stories that suddenly become popular. Take the obvious current example: business. I assume that the number of hits that the Times’ business stories get these days is much greater than it was two years ago. Yet if the paper had been following Blodget’s counsel, any number of the people writing about business for the Times today would have been fired, leaving the Times without the resources to cover today’s news in the detail it deserves. Part of what makes the Times great is that it has the resources to cover stories in depth when the need arises, and that’s only possible if there’s a cushion built into the system.