Newsweek Redux

I am waiting breathlessly for my next issue of “Newsweek”. It often gets here by Tuesday (today); but sometimes gets here as late as Wednesday or Thursday. Here in the boonies they don’t really care if it gets here until Friday. But I really want to see this week’s issue.
The editors have been hinting that there were going to be big changes when the May 18 issue came out, and last week they wrote a two page article explaining how “Newsweek” is going to reinvent itself. I’m not entirely happy with the way it has been reinventing itself over the past four decades.
Will I like this new style better? I’m skeptical. I rather liked the model Henry Luce set forth in 1925 when he created “Time Magazine”. It was a NEWS magazine. It was specifically designed to give busy but curious people and overview of what was going on all over the world and all over the country in short, quickly absorbed articles.
“Newsweek” imitated that format when it began to publish in 1933. In the 1940s and 50s I was happy with both magazines. I could pick up either one and find out what was happening In Peru, on Wall Street, in medicine, movies, art, education, the Cold War and politics. I came away from each issue feeling I had at least a superficial grasp of what most parts of our planet were up to.
They began to deviate from this model in the 1960s. “Newsweek”, especially, began publishing in-depth articles of the kind I would prefer to read in “Harpers”, “Atlantic” or even “The New Yorker”—or a newspaper like the “Wall Street Journal,” “The Washington Post” or the “New York Times”.
Then the long, in-depth articles came faster and faster. There were fewer and fewer one column takes on the more obscure places on earth. Fewer and fewer articles (but longer and longer), much less universal coverage.
Over the past few years, “Newsweek” has come to read more like a publication from Rodale Press with its incessant emphasis on Boomer health problems. Several times I almost wrote the editor to complain about this—could we get back to NEWS?—but I felt it would make to no difference. Editors know what sells their magazine, and they could safely ignore an atavistic crank like myself.
Now this model isn’t working. “Newsweek” is losing money. Staff has been cut back about 30%--is there still a Beirut office where I stood reading the ticker about the riots here after King was shot? They’re blaming it on the internet and the immediacy of news coming by blog and on-line new service.
But will more essays help? Will readers really be happy that “We will no longer reflexively cover the week’s events if we don’t have something original to say.” Translation: reasonably objective coverage of informative news from around the world is now totally a thing of the past.
Their new chief executive, a Tom Ascheim, who arrived two years ago from Nickelodeon, promises that his new model “Newsweek” will again be profitable in a few years. But should they perhaps put some other word on the cover in front of “….week”?
I read the news online. Who doesn’t? I watch it on TV—but nothing quite takes the place of holding a paper and ink news source. When that finally goes away, I will miss it.
It’s going. Look at what’s happening to newspapers. “Newsweek” admits that one of the problems is that advertisers no longer care about the mass market that a news magazine could bring them. They want smaller, demographic specific audiences.
“Newsweek” writes that it is going to upgrade its paper stock—to be classier—and dump up to a million subscribers who don’t fit the desired demographic. “We will focus on a smaller, more devoted, slightly more affluent audience.” Subscription prices will go up. Why does the image of an “Architectural Digest” for news junkies come to mind?
There will also be an overhaul of Newsweek.com where, we are told, more people read “Newsweek” on line than read it in paper. On the site, they will refer you to other media sources on the same topic (that could be good) and allow you to twitter a response.
Much of this all will be in imitation of “Newsweek’s” foreign editions—where, they tell us, “profits and ad pages” went up in 2008. And, I have to admit, that is the name of the game. Without profits and ad pages, no magazine or paper can exist.
I think I first realized how important ads and revenue were to the news business many years ago when I heard an editor refer to the “news hole”. In other words, between the ads, you have a hole in which to stick the news. No doubt Ben Franklin would agree.
I’m not angry with “Newsweek”. It has to do what a magazine has to do to survive. It is going to aim at what it calls “a large domestic audience—17 million strong—of smart, educated readers who are looking for a publication that can help them put the flood of news into perspective.”
Whoa. That’s precisely what Henry Luce—and his imitators—did. Allow the full flood and put it into perspective. What the new media are doing is channeling the flood into just those areas that they feel the non-reflective reader will stand still for, and then give him long essays to tell him what to think about the few topics he’s aware of.
They have no choice. The news hole simply cannot stand by itself. I have the feeling that the new news magazines will tell more about their readers than the news. The editor makes it very clear that these changes are reader/advertiser inspired.
Maybe my first reinvented copy will come tomorrow.