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I had the name of a Times Escapes editor but I didn’t have his phone number, so I did the obvious thing — I visited the Times home page to find the paper’s main number in New York, where a living person — or, more likely, a disembodied voice — could connect me to the editor. “Contact us” took me to plenty of e-mail addresses I didn’t want and to extensions where I could record messages that would be read in due time by departments I had no interest in speaking with. But there was no number where someone could “put you through,” as telephone operators used to say. No switchboard number at all.
Do you remember how newspapers used to make people feel welcome? And in return people made newspapers feel welcome! Those were good times. Now the drawbridge is up. “That’s not quite true,” McElroy protested. “We’ve made the drawbridge longer to walk across but we try to keep it down.” He said that before he discovered his newspaper hadn’t put its home phone on its Web site.
