New York Times axes chess column

[Stewart Reuben]

I suddenly thought yesterday. The Daily Telegraph has a chess column Monday to Friday. On Saturday there are two separate ones. There is also one in the Sunday Telegraph. There are also regular bridge columns, but only one on Saturday.
Clearly the editor and/or marketing manager doesn't think that the days of good chess columns are numbered.
In the dailies in England there are Guardian, Independent, Telegraph and Times. London Evening Standard chess column is now only available online.
The BCF used to provide a free weekly column which was quite widely published by local newspapers. I think it stopped when Ray Keene was no longer connected with the BCF.
John Saunders used to provide an excellent service on teletext (I may have the wrong name).

[JustinHorton]

The BCF used to provide a free weekly column which was quite widely published by local newspapers. I think it stopped when Ray Keene was no longer connected with the BCF.

Ex Acton ad Astra

Keene was endlessly inventive when it came to finding ways of reusing what he had already published. It was also in 1984 that, again acting as a representative of the British Chess Federation, he persuaded the insurance firm Legal & General to sponsor a syndicated weekly column that would be distributed to local newspapers around Britain. The flimsy sales pitch for which Legal & General fell was that many newspapers would use the free material as the basis for regular articles (even if they had never run a chess column), and in their gratitude would be bound to give Legal & General a mention. Unsurprisingly nearly all the columns so distributed were recyclings of old Keene journalism, and also unsurprisingly they led to very few mentions of Legal & General. When it dawned on the insurers a couple of years later that they were not getting much for their sponsorship money, Keene promptly found another gullible company, Peterborough Software, and continued the syndicated column for a further two years.

[Mike Gunn]

As a teenager I developed my interest in chess mainly by playing through the game (and trying to solve the chess problem) in the Sunday Times magazine column by Alexander. None of my friends at school (at that time) played chess, my parents didn't encourage an interest in chess and there was nothing on TV on Sunday morning in those days (the 1960s). I had nothing to do on Sunday mornings apart from wait for my mother to finish cooking the Sunday lunch and my father to return from his round of golf, so I found what I could in the paper that my father bought.

OK, we now live in different times (the internet etc) but on the internet (although you sometimes find things by accident) you generally find the thing (or an approximation to it) that you are searching for. The thing about real newspapers, real libraries and real books is that it is much easier to come across something that catches your eye by idle browsing. And the chess diagram catches the eye - there it was - always on the same page as the bridge column and the brain teaser, so I'm with Stewart on this. I can buy the Guardian on my Kindle (if I wanted to, and it's cheaper) but why would I want to - the electronic copy isn't as good as the real thing.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

OK, we now live in different times (the internet etc) but on the internet (although you sometimes find things by accident) you generally find the thing (or an approximation to it) that you are searching for. The thing about real newspapers, real libraries and real books is that it is much easier to come across something that catches your eye by idle browsing.

Really? I find that browsing the internet is still possible. You just have to know how to do it without getting too distracted. I spent a bit of time this morning browsing the BBC iPlayer site, and they have lots of archive material there that is fascinating. Not to do with chess, but I managed to bookmark or add to my favourites documentaries ranging from the space race, to Mesoamerica, to architecture, and just now I found the old David Attenborough documentaries on the Zambezi River. Whether I will get the time to watch some of this stuff is another question, but the archive stuff tends to be available for a long time (over a year at least).

Sadly, searching for chess:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search?q=chess

Only brought up the Only Connect program, the Mechanical Marvels (the chess-playing Turk automata is mentioned) and the New Tricks episode 'The English Defence' (which I still haven't watched yet). So nothing more than has already been mentioned here. But I wonder if the BBC have chess-related material in their archives they could be persuaded to put up on the iPlayer?

[Ian Thompson]

Sadly, searching for chess:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search?q=chess

Only brought up the Only Connect program, the Mechanical Marvels (the chess-playing Turk automata is mentioned) and the New Tricks episode 'The English Defence' (which I still haven't watched yet). So nothing more than has already been mentioned here.

The limitation of that is that it only searches the titles of programmes, so any general programme that has a piece on chess isn't going to be found. For example, I happened to be listening to Radio 4 last weekend and No End of Pleasure mentioned chess - "David Levy is an international chess master whose experience of playing games with computers means he anticipates a world where the relationship humans have with machines might develop away from the chess board in ways that bring physical and emotional satisfactions."

I'll leave it to the curious to find out what he thought robots would be able to do in the future .

[John Saunders]

As a teenager I developed my interest in chess mainly by playing through the game (and trying to solve the chess problem) in the Sunday Times magazine column by Alexander. None of my friends at school (at that time) played chess, my parents didn't encourage an interest in chess and there was nothing on TV on Sunday morning in those days (the 1960s). I had nothing to do on Sunday mornings apart from wait for my mother to finish cooking the Sunday lunch and my father to return from his round of golf, so I found what I could in the paper that my father bought.

Spooky. I could have written every word of that about myself (including the bit about the father coming home from golf). For a while I even cut out the columns and pasted them into a scrapbook. The Barden and Alexander newspaper columns were pretty well the only chess resources available to me for quite some time.

Incidentally, Hugh Alexander's column in the Sunday Times gets a mention in an article I have just written for the next (November) issue of CHESS.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

An rebuttal of the Slate piece has been written by the NYT chess columnist (ex-columnist?) and published by Chessbase:

http://en.chessbase.com/post/dylan-mccl ... ess-column

'Dylan McClain on the NY Times chess column'

Well worth reading.

[Mick Norris]

An rebuttal of the Slate piece has been written by the NYT chess columnist (ex-columnist?) and published by Chessbase:

http://en.chessbase.com/post/dylan-mccl ... ess-column

'Dylan McClain on the NY Times chess column'

Well worth reading.

Thanks for that Chris, not sure that all will appreciate what he says , particularly

The chess world is rife with conflicts of interest. Many people who might otherwise be qualified to write about chess with authority have past or current business relationships with people or organizations they might or would have to write about, or they are friends with those people. That makes it impossible for them to be unbiased or objective.

[Paul Bielby]

All is not black on the newspaper front, despite the demise of the NEW YORK TIMES column! Tne SOUTH SHIELDS GAZETTE has decided to promote its excellent fortnightly chess column to weekly! Congratulations to Simon McGuinness the writer of the column!

Mind you it is a very local column - Simon told me the editors objected to an article he wrote on Jonathan Hawkins winning the British Championship - even Consett is not sufficiently local for South Shields.