If you’re looking for more evidence that the geeks are taking over the national discourse, the Times is now running a weekly bestseller list for graphic novels and manga in its ArtBeats blog. I give it another 9-12 months before we start seeing lists in the Times for the most watched streaming videos and bestselling e-books. And now I have another resource to fuel my only slightly out-of-control comic book purchasing habit.
Incidentally, the Times’ blogs are becoming must-reads for me. Blogs like The Caucus (politics), Bits (technology), and Economix (economics with a practical twist) provide great supplements to the regular articles and links to other points of interest on the Web; exactly what good blogs should do. Plenty of newspapers, including the Times, are struggling to survive, but the Times seems to have a better grasp on how to use the medium of the Web to develop content (like this photo profile of Obama’s staff) that would be much more static and uninteresting in a traditional newspaper.
Interestingly the Obama staff photo profile did appear in print as a NYTimes Sunday Magazine. While it was interesting there, I found it to be much more powerful as presented online.