Saturday, February 13, 2010

Hey, Turns Out The NYT Has A Musical Theme! Sounds Like Aaron Copland On Too Much Coffee.

This morning we listened for the first time to James Barron's NYT Front Page podcast. We'd been noticing it for months and fully intended to check it out, but you know how it is most mornings.

So imagine our surprise to discover, at the top of the podcast that we finally found a few minutes ago, that the NYT has added something distinctive and amazing to its coverage of the news: a musical theme!

We've now listened to it several times, and can state definitively that the NYT favors the string section of the orchestra. Yes, of course it's classical music...duh! Written in a minor key, it's essentially the urgent playing of violins (or were those violas? cellos?) against the backdrop of a tympani drum.

We ain't Anthony Tommasini, but we'll say it's roughly the musical equivalent of a teletype machine clattering in the distance -- a newsroom tune, if you will. It opens the podcast and then settles into a groove of gentle pitter-patter under James Barron's mellow pipes. He's an NPR clone, by the way, pleasant yet serious, and gets props for correctly pronouncing sad new arrivals in the lexicon, like luger.

2 comments:

Cope said...

If this is really your first time listening to the Front Page podcast then you probably don't know that they've just recently changed it up a bit.

Before James Barron would just read the headlines and give you the gist of the all the stories on the front page. Then he'd do the same for the front pages of the other sections. No music or anything just Barron by himself reading in his nasally monotone. I liked that.

Now they've changed it. It started last week. They added the music and now they play clips of interviews and I don't like it. I like it better when it was just nice and simple. Now it seems that they're trying to wow us. I've unsubcribed to the podcast now.

Anonymous said...

Always drop by your blog every now and then, and have enjoyed your pickings. How're you liking the TimesSkimmer feature?
Despite all my iPhone squinting 20 something peers, I still firmly prefer my news on print and not on screen, I'm finding it to be a whole lot more inviting then their regular site, which I normally barely visit.
Do you read the print version?