It took a good few months, possibly a year to get used to the New York Times style of slowly coming around to the nub of a story. One of yesterday’s front page items completely perplexed Felix Salmon:

The institutional verbosity of the Times makes my routine more difficult. But most of the time the NYT manages to say what the news is, at least.

David Carr’s story in the Times yesterday about the uncertainty of life on US newspapers made grim reading:

“I think that quality newspapers could go on for years and attract a very solid readership, but you have an industry with problems that is still struggling to be among the most profitable in the country,” said Mr. Roberts, the former editor of The Inquirer (and a former managing editor at The New York Times). He mentioned John Carroll, who left the Tribune Company after tiring of spending all of his time on the cost side of the business. “John said there used to be a dozen ways to measure success in our business and now there is only one.”

In Print, Staring Down a Daily Worry – New York Times.

I’ve been working on a story all day, it’s midnight and I am still not at the end of my notes. It’s not good to be writing so late at night.

During my last five minute break I discovered last.fm. It’s only been about 15 minutes but I am already sold. Basically, you download a very simple player, type in the name of an artist/band you like and it tailors the following selection of music to your taste. You can even download a plugin that monitors your listening habits on iTunes and makes your last.fm station even better.

If like me you have 30 gig of music and are still stuck for something to listen to fairly often, you might like this.

UPDATE: Thanks to Bill who just recommended a similar service called Pandora (via Terry Teachout) that doesn’t require downloading a player. Looks good to me, although as Bill points out there’s no classical music which last.fm does offer.

What can I say? WordPress (the blogging platform I use for this site) has just blown me away. As you can see I’ve made a lot of changes over the past 24 hours, starting with an upgrade to the latest version of WordPress(2.0.2). And followed by a switch to this excellent theme by Andreas Viklund and Ainslie Johnson.

If you’re using an older version of WordPress: Upgrade now. If you don’t use WordPress: Consider switching. Why? Because of the phenomenal choice it gives you with themes, plugins, and now widgets.

Widgets allow you to edit blog sidebars without having to tinker with the code—a wonderful solution for amateurs like me. I organized the layout of both of these sidebars in a matter of minutes using widgets. (This is what the Sidebar Widgets screen looks like.) And thanks to developers like Trevor Creech I’m able to add features like the translate function on the left in a matter of minutes.

Better yet, this image was uploaded directly from the editing screen (in the past I had to upload all of my images using an FTP client). Plus there’s a host of extra little functions that make working with links, images, posts and pages a good deal easier.

Now, I’m not going to pretend any of this is straightforward. In fact, if it wasn’t for the super skills of a certain macboy over the past two years this blog would not even exist. But that’s where WordPress gets even better, because with WordPress.com you get all the functionality of WordPress without the web and coding skills needed for a privately-hosted weblog.

Considering switching? Here’s an interesting Movable Type vs. WordPress post via Blogging Pro.

Gay Talese is not an easy man to interview. The legendary writer didn’t elude me the way Frank Sinatra eluded him in 1966, which resulted in one of the most celebrated articles ever to appear in Esquire (“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”), but he was a challenge in other ways.

As it turned out, I think I ultimately learned more from the difficulties of writing about Talese than I would have learned had he been completely cooperative and forthcoming.

A few hours after I had faxed Talese requesting an interview, I received a phone call from the 74-year-old writer, who has been out of the limelight for 14 years. Within the first few minutes of our conversation, he listed all the reasons he would not be able to do an interview: He was working on the introduction for a New York Times photography book, his publishers at Knopf were scheduling events to promote his new book, “A Writer’s Life” and he was preparing to leave in April to teach a writing class at the University of Southern California. “I’m not just sitting around, you know,” he said.

After proving that he had no time for me, he asked how much of his time I needed. I replied that I was hoping to conduct two or three interviews and maybe shadow him for an afternoon. “Shadow me?” he snapped. “I don’t want you to shadow me. I have things to do.”

The beginning of a fascinating interview with Gay Talese. (Via Mediabistro.)