JAY ROSEN has an interesting post regarding bloggers and the New York Times, and it reminds me of something I wanted to say at the conference, but never got a chance to say. Bloggers bash the Times’ reporting all the time. (Though as the Times’ Allen Siegal notes, it’s not all bad: “We’re not happy that blogs became the forum for our dirty linen, but somebody had to wash it and it got washed.”)

But we pick on the Times not least because we have a vision of it that’s perhaps more optimistic than that of anyone who actually works there. And, in fact, the Times is the best overall newspaper on the Web: its coverage is more comprehensive, its website is well-designed, easy to navigate, and reliable, and though the reporting is often shaded with stealth punditry in some areas, the reporting in other areas is the best around — in the area of nanotechnology, for example, the Times has everybody else beat, except for specialty publications like Smalltimes. That’s why we link to it so much, and why we talk about it so much.