Literate cities

Both the NYT and WSJ are making a play for Bay Area readers. While this reflects the wobbling state of the SF Chronicle (which delivered papers gratis to my north Berkeley neighborhood last week, pitching for subscriptions), it also speaks to the region's connection to New York as a center of the written word. (DC is more a center of the talking head.) We're emerging from a period when many periodicals sought to be "entertainment." Some were better than others, but ephemeral was the operative word - and ephemeral has left the building. So will the NYT go the way of Le Monde, focusing on politics and culture, and catering to the cognoscenti? The WSJ under Murdoch is a livelier read than it was, but more and more like other Murdoch papers in look and feel - a blend of Murdoch's instincts and the WSJ's biases, sometimes convergent, but often not. (It's refreshing to find, as I did last night, a WSJ columnist trashing Fox News.) Barron's, part of Dow Jones, seems to fly under the Murdoch radar. I've always liked its mix of cynicism and hucksterism, each well-labeled. The design press would do well to be as forthright.