There were so many things to read this morning! In particular, there was one story about a media company going up and another story about another media company going down. At the end of both, one was left with the sense that perhaps the trend toward listicles and charticles was not all a bad thing. Perhaps the future is all about sifting and sorting and curating!

There was Talk of the Town editor Lauren Collins writing about Arianna Huffington in the New Yorker today. One might have felt a bit wary after being burned by her recent profile of Michelle Obama. (The magazine's more recent profile of Cindy McCain, by new hire Ariel Levy, provided a strong point of contrast in profile-writing!) This is more entertaining than the Obama profile, as any profile of Arianna would have to be. Nearly everything is in it, from her college days to her hard-boiled eggs to her cult leader to her plagiarism lawsuit to a thousand people testifying to what it is that makes Arianna such a whirlwind.

There also isn't much there for all the stuff that is there. It is neither particularly pleasurable, as crammed with mundane facts as it is, nor is it particularly enlightening regarding the age in which we live. It has the feel of facing down a brick wall.

In any event Arianna's website, the Huffington Post, is apparently making lots of money, which is handy; while it is heavily-staffed with administrators, it does not much pay its people who actually create content.

On the other end of town, Joe Hagan in New York looks at the New York Times clan and its youngest generation, who are maturing into potential family trust or family company board members, Times executives—or sellers of the paper—who do actually pay their "content-producers."

Again there is this sense of that brick wall:

So it's fair to wonder, as the Times' own public editor, Clark Hoyt, did last year, "How united are the Sulzbergers, and what holds them together? Who is the next generation, and how committed are they to the family's long practice of investing heavily in quality journalism, even in rocky financial times?" It's a question that's impossible to answer with any certainty, and one that's difficult even to address....

Okay then.

But Hagan at least, after a few pages of windup intro, at least notes just how bad it's gotten for the Sulzbergers: "The family's collective and individual shares are valued at a third of what they were worth in the late nineties. One Wall Street executive briefed on the family's holdings estimated that the central trust is now worth somewhere between $270 million and $300 million."

He also describes how the family is sending the company spiralling into financial doom:

Sulzberger has quietly ramped up the amount of cash they receive in a quarterly cash dividend. This, more than the sale of stock, is the source of the Ochs-Sulzbergers' working wealth. Sulzberger and CEO Janet Robinson raised the dividend by an extraordinary 31 percent last year--even as the stock price declined. Of the $132 million a year the paper gives to shareholders, about $25 million of it now goes directly into the coffers of the Ochs-Sulzberger trusts.

But the payoff exacts a harsh price: The company is going deeper into debt to pay the high-yield dividend.

Like many dynasties, the Sulzbergers are managing their money fantastically poorly.

(For those that need reminding, for just one example, the Sulzbergers sold their 263-acre estate, on the Connecticut-New York border, back in 1992 for for $6.7 million. Last year, the new owners put it on the market for $95 million, where it has been sitting ever since. And will presumably wait out the market downturn before being purchased by some Russian.)

But why is the profile suffering? Why is it so bloody dull? With few exceptions—the rip-roaring Rolling Stone takedown of John McCain, that Cindy McCain profile, and, hmm, when was the last time Vanessa Grigoriadis published something?—they have become boring and stilted and expected and lifeless.

A flip through the incoming crop of magazines reveals nothing better. Details is a HORROR SHOW. (It is!) And Esquire's new cover story on Halle Berry reveals it to be a mini-profile in the form of an acceptance speech for being the most beautiful woman in the universe or something, and is actually written by herself, with a co-writer.

To that magazine's credit, it also features an amazing state-by-state election guide! Seriously, it's hard to believe that they did it. Very impressive. And also: Well, it's a charticle! The best thing in the magazine is a list. If the few people who bother reading aren't getting met halfway by the writers and editors, well then we might as well all just settle for the Daily Beast that we deserve.