The Case of the Missing Surowiecki Column

Memo to Jeff Bercovici: What's with Jim Surowiecki's column in this week's New Yorker? It's right there on the website – complete with no fewer than nineteen hyperlinks. (Someone give this guy a blog!) But it's in the "online only" section: if you pick up the actual magazine, it skips straight from the Talk of the Town section to the feature well, which means that Surowiecki's "Financial Page" is a page only in metaphor.

The most charitable explanation I can think of is that the New Yorker decided the column was simply too reliant on its hyperlinks to work in print. But if that's the case, why didn't they just ask Surowiecki to write a different column, or to rewrite this one so that it worked in print form? Could this be the point at which the New Yorker's editors decided that an article on the website would get just as many readers as an article in the magazine? (I doubt that's true, but you never know.) And in any case, given that Surowiecki is writing for a print magazine, not a website, how come he filed a column so hyperlink-heavy in the first place?

I can't remember Surowiecki ever being banished from the print edition like this before, which is why it's so bittersweet to read this, from Mark Thoma:

I am very pleased to see this, and not just because there's a link to this site. I've been frustrated with the press on the 'Laffer curve, tax cuts have paid for themselves' issue because the press has enabled a big lie. It's a lie Republican candidates, even the president, can still repeat with very little attention from the mainstream media. No matter how often reputable economists on the right and the left have said this is a lie, the press has ignored it and allowed it to continue unquestioned.

He's writing, of course, about Surowiecki's column, which is about supply-side economics. And it turns out that the one time he singles out "the press" for praise in exposing the lie is also the one time that the article remains unprinted by any physical press.

Update: Both Surowiecki and Blake Eskin, the New Yorker's web editor, respond in the comments. Apparently this is the second in an occasional series of web-only columns, which will appear in some weeks when the print column doesn't appear.