"News" in the loosest sense of the word

Two articles in The New York Times over the last few days caught my eye. I love the great Gray Lady, but sometimes even she occasionally provides fodder for the argument that newspapers are just outmoded and hopelessly withering in the face of New Media.

Sunday's article about the drop in online sales doesn't seem all that newsworthy as stalwarts of the virtual mall like Gloss or--sniff, sniff--my beloved Girlshop (now replaced by the hopelessly haughty Net-a-Porter) have announced they're biting the dust. Getting their e-mail was news; but Times article about the drop in online buying doesn't mention them, and seems a little out of the loop. I thought the dot-com bubble had already burst, and the industry had rebounded, perhaps not quite as robustly--but then nothing about this economy is as robust as the halcyon days of the Clinton administration, right?

The only interesting thing about Sunday's NYT article was that it fed into my own paranoia. I was a pretty hard-core online fashion addict, but quit more or less cold turkey once I had maxed out a couple of credit cards--and that, my friends, was when the dot-com bubble burst, leaving me to wonder, psychotically, if there never was any bubble, just me, Girlshop, and my AmEx. Some years later, I re-engaged in online shopping, more responsibly, more gradually, but still. So then when the summer went by and I'd bought nothing except some skinny jeans that I sent back, and then I hear they're going out of business, it raised the dot-com paranoia all over again. How many of us are really buying from these sites? The merch was always seemed expensive enough; I just assumed someone, somewhere was making money, and Girlshop was around long enough--and really so was Gloss--that it seemed like it had whethered the storm of online shopping fads (Pets.com, anyone?) and had become an institution replete with offline, real-time anchor to complement its online offerings.

So today, the NYT tops itself with this authoritative discourse on OpenTable.com. I don't know about you buy I've been using OpenTable for about a hundred years and presumably, so have the restaurants at which I have made reservations using its services. The little tidbits about the way restaurants use it to log info about their patrons--ok, that was interesting--but news? No.

No news, I guess, is good news, right?