The End of the New York Times?

Vanity Fair has a rather long article on The New York Times:

The familiar Times reader, the eastern-establishment reader—as dedicated and loyal and homogeneous an audience as few newspapers have ever had—has largely been abandoned by the Times. Or—a supposition the Times may share with the Bush administration—that audience simply may not exist anymore. Or it's just aged out of the economic mainstream. The new Times reader is ? well, it's not exactly clear who the new reader is.

Unlike The Washington Post, which has put much of its editorial and business energies into dominating its local market, the Times's strategy—a doomsday scenario, foreseeing a one-newspaper nation, a last-man-standing paper—has been to make the paper national. Hence, The New York Times is no longer principally a metropolitan paper. With a daily circulation of 260,000 in the five boroughs, it's no longer even creditably a New York paper. (Its two tabloid competitors, the Daily News and the New York Post, have far more readers in New York City.) It's an Everyman suburban daily.

Here's the identity crisis: when the president is attacking it with all the media available to him, can the Times count on this new reader, and the advertisers who are courting him, not to doubt it? What beats in the heart of a reader of the St. Paul Pioneer Press whom the Times circulation-promotion campaign has persuaded to read the Times too? (In media-marketing terms, this new reader, the national urban-suburban yuppie type, overloaded on media choices—broadband, digital cable, satellite radio—is among the most fickle.)

There are only so many tenured professors in the hinterlands.