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.