Or, to be more precise, the bot posts when the program trawls through the Times’ Web site and finds a word-uncapitalized (to avoid names, whose novelty isn’t particularly notable) and without certain special symbols, such as a hashtag or an at sign-that isn’t present in the paper’s extensive digital archive, which dates back to the Times’ foundation, in 1851. The account does exactly what it says on the box: it tweets whenever the Times uses a word that it has never used before. You can watch that growth in real time with the Twitter bot which was created about six years ago by the engineer and artist Max Bittker. Now, though, the only thing that unites the Times’ disparate community is language, specifically English, and a version of that language tightly regulated by a famously stringent style guide for telling “All the News That’s Fit to Print” (or to post).Īs the paper changes-to address new realities, like cryptocurrency, but also to cover new communities, like whatever Gen Z is-that language grows, quickly. (Eight million were digital-only domestic print circulation hovered around three hundred and forty-three thousand on weekdays and eight hundred and twenty thousand on Sundays.) You might once have read the paper that covered your local community, and perhaps also your region or country. The aim of the Times, according to its last available annual report, is to “be the essential subscription for every English-speaking person seeking to understand and engage with the world.” The publication counts subscribers in two hundred and thirty-six countries and territories, and of its 8.8 million subscriptions in 2021 more than a million were international. The New York Times is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an old-fashioned extra-extra-hear-all-about-it newspaper, but it’s also the poster child for the medium’s metamorphosis. Newspapers have long been about more than just news they appear less and less on paper and, despite their geographically inflected names, aren’t firmly rooted in any particular place. What is a newspaper? Though a few decades ago the answer might have been obvious, it’s no longer so easy to say.
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