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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8356 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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Thanks for picking that year, as that is the earliest Press Kit I can find for NR easily available online. It gives a breakdown of what their readership looks like* for the purposes of selling advertising

You probably could have saved yourself some time, if you agreed on this metric ahead of time. Personally, it seems like a pretty bad approach to measuring who's more in touch of the common man.

Huh?

I might be misunderstanding the intentions in your previous comment, but I was under the impression you're trying to come up with some objective measure to see if this statement from Naraburns is true:

By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer.

If that's what you're going for, looking at the demographics of each paper seems like a pretty bad approach.

My intention would be to show that neither paper particularly represents the point of view of The Common Man and that writers for both have lost the Common Touch. I'm not particularly arguing for the NYT having a more middle class readership, only arguing against the NR. Nara and I agree on the NYT afaict.

Why would you say that the demographics are a bad approach, and what would you consider a better approach?

Certainly, it's hypothetically possible to imagine a magazine that has a wealthy, elderly, male, highly educated readership that skews towards DC residents but represents in its content primarily the views of those less wealthy, less educated, younger, and more rural than the readership. But I would argue that the views of the readership are highly likely to skew the views represented in the content over time. It's really hard to resist readership capture.

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