It's fascinating to see how far the pendulum has swung since those days. Maybe there is no place for honest writing anymore, as he described it, in the blogs of that era, which suffered the same issues of PR and monetization.

> At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times.

I wonder if this holds true.

It is true, but sometimes in an evil way; the NYT literally has a policy that all stories about tech companies must be negative, and the politics section presents everything as the fault of whoever the editors are personally mad at that day. But the details are correct.

I somehow doubt that this is read as much as it is posted on HN.

Most of the book criticism they do summarizes to the point where I don’t feel the need to buy anything so I’m not sure it’s personally working as an ad for me.

Some people want the gory details. Every non-fiction book can be summarized as (wo)man v something, but in doing so, you lose the plot. So while you may be satisfied with the summary (and you're not alone!), knowing that it's out there is more important for people to buy than the summarization.

It's so New Yorker. They're partial to angst-heavy stories.

If "retired fighter with a tea shop" interests you, try the "Legends and Lattes" stories.