Spinning it out

Sometimes one wonders about the New York Times. I read it most days on the Web, and find it useful and exasperating in equal measure. Being accustomed to writing for a British newspaper — where there is always desperate competition for space — I’m irritated by the way NYT journalists are allowed to spin their stuff out. Witness this piece in today’s Times which takes forever to say two things: (a) Google has a lot of PhDs working for it, actively recruits only PhDs and builds research and development into their daily jobs; (b) Microsoft doesn’t especially require recruits to have PhDs, and corrals its R&D into a separate research division. On a British newspaper it would be a 400-word piece at most. But then, we operate in a viciously competitive market, whereas the NYT has a near-monopoly in its market.