Judging Newsweek by its current incarnation is like judging a man’s life after visiting him in the Alzheimer’s ward. The Newsweek of today is a pale imitation of the magazine I grew up with in the 70’s and early 80’s, and it played an important role in that era’s media environment.
Back then, there was no Internet, CNN had just started, and you couldn’t get the New York Times outside of New York. The local paper was dull and mediocre, and TV news was a quick half hour. When something big happened, Newsweek would have a well-sourced summary of the event, usually from an angle that wasn’t covered in any other publication. Their major coverage was always accompanied by good color photos and quality infographics. For most of us in middle America, Newsweek was as good as it got, and it wasn’t half bad.
Of course, outside of the major news story, Newsweek was mediocre at best. The thumbsucker pieces (“Is God Dead?”), the bad opinion columnists, and the laughable arts section have been beaten to death elsewhere. The only defense I’ll offer is that the Newsweek of old used those crappy think pieces as filler when there wasn’t a major event to cover. Today’s Newsweek seems to revel in churning out that crap.
The reason Newsweek comes to mind today is this story in the Post. It’s a first-person account of the collapse of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and it’s the kind of story that would have been featured in Newsweek. Today, we take a story like that for granted. A few decades ago, Newsweek was one of the few places where the vast majority of Americans would be able to get that kind of angle on an important national event.
asiangrrlMN
I seem to recall our family having a Newsweek subscription when I was a teen (in the 80s) and reading it for the main articles as you said. They actually had meat in them. These days, it’s all filler, sad to say.
frankdawg
Great story on that link, thanks.
I used to enjoy Newsweek because they usually tied things together, gave the background & clarified the story a lot. Our current news model is to run from one sensation to the next & never really examine the cause, or affect, the last sensation had (though in most cases these sensations are so trivial and banal that is not a bad thing). It was reflective and enlightening two things missing from the shock-jock media circus we ‘enjoy’ today.
Jules
“Is God Dead?” cover was Time, not Newsweek
clayford
I remember a couple of Newsweek covers just before I let my subscription expire. One was “The Birth of Jesus” and another was “The Real George Washington”. It was like my grandmother had been named Editor in Chief.
BR
You mean the Newsweek of the 70s that ran stories about “global cooling”, which was against even most of the scientific evidence of the time?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/global-cooling-again/
I guess they were just being contrarian.
bob h
I still can’t get used to the idea of a post-print world. It will all be incoherent, white-noise.
Xenos
James Fallows has a nice overview of the financial problems for the newsweeklies. It looks that the quality (wealth) of the readership is not high enough for the advertising to support the magazines at the lower levels of readership. And it won’t be easy to cut costs because the layout and photographic quality of the magazine result in too high fixed costs.
So I guess we can expect them to limp on for a while and then implode.
Albatrossity
Slightly off-topic, but since you mentioned that first-person story in WaPo about the drilling rig, here is another valuable source of information about that event. It’s a blog dedicated to oil drilling industry topics, and (despite its appalling white-text/black-background format) an excellent read right now.
mistermix
@Jules: I can only plead truthiness — I couldn’t think of a comparable Newsweek cover.
@BR: Agreed – my point was that the major news coverage that was their bread and butter used to be decent and not available elsewhere.
Xenos
Forgot to add the link to Fallows.
c u n d gulag
The most recent edition had an article on ‘war porn,’ and an Evan Thomas’s article about men’s love of war (in which he takes some responsiblity for the rush to war after 9/11). I thought both were very good articles.
Anyone remember Life” and “Look?” Both were great mag’s for pictures. If I remember right, the lights on “Look” went out first, then “Life” died.
And how about “The Saturday Evening Post?”
Boy, am I dating myself. But I remember all three from my childhood in the ’60’s. My family was devastated when “Life” folded.
Ah, but “National Geographic” still runs strong.
And it’s “TIme” that has sucked far worse than Newsweek.”
Woodrowfan
Don’t forget Time’s cover story on ice cream back in the late 70s!!!
My family got “Time” I think i read Newsweek in college. Yeah, it was pretty good pre-internet… But then, we had 2 daily newspapers too…
mai naem
My dad used to have Newsweek,US World and News and Readers Digest subscriptions(and no he was definitely not a conservative.) I try but manage to forget half the time to maintain Atlantic Monthly, Wash. Monthly and Economist subscriptions. Newsweek to me was the more substantial weekly as compared to Time which was flashier. I think its bad that all this print media is having financial problems. The web is good but,sorry, TPM is not even close to the NYT and not even Newsweek. Huff Post and a bunch of blogs just link to print media stories. And forget broadcast media. David Gregory is no Charlie Savage and Katie Couric is no Dana Priest.
Leonard Stiltskin
I remember looking forward to reading Newsweek after the presidential elections in the 80s and 90s. I seem to recall they always had unparalleled access to the candidates but were prohibited from reporting until after the elections were over. It was always an interesting read.
I haven’t subscribed in years, so my memories are of the quick hits in the front of the magazine, the conventional wisdom watch, and the parade of varying back page op eds. Even George Will was somewhat interesting back then, except when he was writing some long-winded humorless treatise about the downfall of baseball.
I fully expect some right wing benefactor to glom onto the magazine and put the final nail in the coffin, but not before sullying what little is left of its reputation.
Brian J
I can understand why there is an incredible amount of mixed feelings on the value of the magazine. On the one hand, while it’s not always horrendous, it’s usually mediocre, which is why I don’t read it very often. On the other hand, even as it intentionally slices its audience in half, it’s still got a lot of readers. Changing the magazine wouldn’t keep all of those readers around, especially if they are older, but it’s probably a helluva lot easier to change a title with such wide brand recognition rather than start something entirely new. Thus, I can see why there might be a lot of interested bidders.
It’s kind of hard to stand out these days, so in the vein of the old Wall Street Journal, perhaps a revamped Newsweek should zig while others zag. Purposely don’t follow the same path that everyone else is taking. Look at the stories from a different angle, or better yet look at the stories that nobody is looking at. There’s a ton of unemployed journalists out there. Hire a bunch with a financial background, tell them to investigate the shit out of everyone, and see what they come up with, because as CJR’s The Audit claims, there’s a lot of unearthed terrain out there. Maybe the strategy should also involve breaking news online, if at all, and then following up with analysis in the magazine.
Other people know how to turn things around a lot more than I do, but suffice it to say that if it really wants to be something different, it probably can be.
Brian J
@Leonard Stiltskin:
For better or worse (probably the latter), Murdoch’s name has come up because News Corp, like so many others, is sitting on a pile of cash. Then again, his name always comes up when something is for sale, so perhaps it’s little more than speculation.
Brian J
@clayford:
HA!
Woodrowfan
I have no doubt that the hardcopy mass media (newspapers and magazines) are dying. You can get free newspapers on the college campus where I teach in most of the buildings and I think I’ve seen students reading a newspaper maybe a handful of times over the past 3 years.
It’s not like everybody was reading papers all the time when I was in school (late 70s-1980s) but it was pretty common. My fraternity got the daily paper delivered and lots of guys read it (and not just the sports page) and there were always students reading newspapers and magazines like Newsweek in the student coffee shop. Nowadays they can’t get young people to read their product when they’re giving it away free. That’s NOT a good sign..
Thomas
Growing up in rural Oklahoma in the 90s my mother subscribed to both Time and Newsweek so I could have access to something other than the useless bird cage liners that were available around here to keep up with current events (The Oklahoman is basically a wannabe New York Post/WSJ). In the dial-up internet age I always looked forward to each arriving in the mail. A year or so ago my mother-in-law gave me a gift subscription to U.S. News which went almost completely unread each week. Print just seems pointless when you can access up to the minute coverage of every major story in the world via the internet. Its amazing how things have changed in only 10-15 years.
Some day the next generation will look at us like we’re describing growing up without indoor plumbing when we describe eagerly anticipating a publication with last week’s news.
zmulls
Amen. Newsweek used to be the thoughtful wrap-up of the news, with longer stories. Instead of the day-to-day reporting, it summarized the bigger story from a remove, assessing it with a cooler eye.
If you didn’t have time to read the newspaper during the week, you could flip through Newsweek and get a decent overview.
But there’s really no need for it now, it’s like a buggy whip for your Model T. It’s hard to say goodbye to something that has been such an institution (and better reading than People in the dentist’s office). But the recent revamp was just shockingly misguided.
Just a bunch of opinion pieces, chosen not for their intelligence and insight, but more for their interesting sounding premises. Talk for the sake of talk, not for knowledge. And they paid….PAID…..Karl Rove for his “unbiased” opinions.
We finally ignored the subscriptions requests. It will arrive for a little while longer and then it will appear no more in our house.
It wouldn’t even be worth getting on a Kindle….
Jerry Elsea
I agree that the old Newsweek had it all. That’s why it was my sole magazine subscription during four years in journalism school five decades ago. I wanted to grow up and be like Newsweek’s reporters.
WereBear
That was it. Word printed on some form of paper was all there was for long form.
So they printed three color and people learned words like cyan and someone knew how much clay to put in the mix and whole buildings shook when the presses ran.
And that’s over. Fuggedaboutit. I have to pay money and lug it upstairs from my mailbox and figure out what to do with it when I finish reading it?
That’s so 20th century.
I’m starting to lose patience with people who say things like “xxx isn’t up to speed,” when we’re talking about oil disasters and two sites have been mentioned that have the inside skinny on this and would be awesome if they were in Newsweek but a) they aren’t and b) they wouldn’t be.
Newsweek is dying because they aren’t cutting it. Every time I’m in the doctor’s office I read such magazines which are several months old and they are laughably, horribly, sickeningly wrong.
Why should they live?
Karen S.
My dad got me a subscription to Newsweek a couple of years ago. Not sure why, seeing as he’s always been a Time reader/subscriber. I never read Newsweek much until he got me the subscription and now I only read it occasionally. I find the opinion pieces so off putting and it’s mostly opinion pieces now. Its arts coverage is ridiculous. When I visit my parents I look at their Time magazines and I’m always struck by how Time has shrunk in physical size. As I set it aside after reading through it in about 5 minutes, I wonder, “Why do they (Time and its overlords) still bother?”
jibeaux
I get it free with the local NPR affiliate donation, and I don’t think it’s awful. Yes, the variety of information on the internet is much better and of course I could do without it, but it has Dahlia Lithwick, Ezra Klein, a halfway decent if brief 2 pages of world roundup a la the Economist, and something interesting on the last page. The last page this past time was a quiz taken from test questions that home ec students in New York State took in 1950. It was fascinating. A month or so ago there was an article about the clusterfuck that is the Afghan police force that I thought was quite good. So nyah, there’s my contrariness for the day.
SpotWeld
I remember the Newsweek cover following the Space Shuttle Columbia tradgedy. The text of it was “On No, Not Again!”. It wasn’t a quote (I believe)… and that right there clinched it for me.
Never subscribed again.
Woodrowfan
@Thomas:
That someday is here. It’s like describing going to vaudeville shows to someone growing up with the movies and TV…
lawguy
I think you kind of over rate Newsweek, I read it a lot in the 60s and 70s and it was kind of a watered down Time at that point.
Interestingly enough if I recall correctly it was started by an FDR ally in the 30s as a counter weight to Time.
ErikaF
I worked at the Houston Newsweek office from 87-92 as a news clipper. In those preinternet days, I’d go thru all the local newspapers, flag and clip articles that were interesting, related to a story, or had a possible angle, and circulate them to the reporters. We kept a file of the articles, and everytime there was a major story, out would come the large folders of articles to use as research (not that they only used the articles – I was impressed by the amount of research and investigation that went on). When I joined Compuserve (really dating myself), I’d use the online databases to supplement the news articles. Only the reporters got to use Lexis/Nexis, since it cost so much! I was there when they worked on the murders in Matamoros, Shrub’s entry into politics (and all the things we learned about him!), the Republican convention in Houston, the Phillips plant explosion in Baytown, and many more.
Over the years it’s become watered down as they laid off so many of the reporters that I worked with. I think there’s a place for the thoughtful news essay on events (I am so tired of the breathless tidbit of news without any context of the news story), but I think they’d do better to switch to more of an online model. The switch to opinion pieces is a big mistake – they should stick to the news stories and investigations, not the blathering of the chattering hordes.
Will
I wasn’t online in the 90’s when I was in college, and we didn’t have a TV. So I depended on my weekly Newsweek subscription to know what on earth was going on. I’ll never forget the first Lewinsky-gate cover…
Roberto
@Woodrowfan: I had to do a bit of research to see what you’re talking about. It was actually 1981. Here’s the TIME ice cream cover, and here’s the glorious story.
Tom Q
Another guy willing to disclose his age by saying I used to love Newsweek. In the 70s I viewed it as the slightly-leftier version of Time, and essential weekly reading in a world where news wasn’t endlessly regurgitated on a 24-hour loop. I’ll even marginally sick up for its arts coverage in those days. Of course it wasn’t cutting edge — it was mainstream by design — but it had critics who didn’t swallow the publicity whole as so many of today’s do.
In the late 80s they did a “re-design”, which amounted to More Flashy Graphics! 30% Less Text!, which I viewed (correctly) as an ominous sign of things to come. But still I stuck with it, partly from habit…
…until January 1998, when I learned of staff writer Michael Isikoff’s aggressive role in the Lewinsky scandal. Stopped buying it that very week, and never went back. Whatever death throes it’s been experiencing lately have been out of my line of vision.
dr. luba
I’m an MD and get newsweekly subscriptions for next to nothing, so I used to get both Time and Newsweek. I dropped Time after they put the Coultergeist on the cover–it was the last straw. I still get Newsweek, but read it less and less, and don’t spend that much time on it any more. Too much opinion in it now–a few good commenters, but mostly dreck. And the cover article may be just a few pages long and superficial.
The Christian Science Monitor switched from a daily to a weekly last year, and is far better that either Time or Newsweek in its coverage. Long stories from all over the world–not just the latest beltway gossip or, as perviously noted, the birth of Jesus. And, despite its provenance, religion is limited to an occasional “religious article” (which is labelled as such). And I say this as an atheist.
Roberto
The Economist is still the only weekly newsmagazine anybody will ever need.
Brachiator
@c u n d gulag:
And what about Highlights for Children? Is that still published?
Long ago I once subscribed to both Time and Newsweek. I just kinda stopped even reading them. Haven’t really thought about either in a long time. I don’t think that news weeklies fill a necessary niche anymore. In the past, maybe they used the additional time to provide more in depth coverage than a daily newspaper could. But given what’s possible with the best of the media, including the Intertubes, everything in a news weekly might be stale when it finally hits the streets.
There is also this bit of collateral damage: news stands are closing all over the place. Sometimes the cover of a news weekly would grab my attention and lead me to buy a magazine. If you can’t conveniently walk by a news vendor’s shop, you ain’t gonna see no magazines. And it’s different when I have to deliberately decide to do an online search, which might be by topic without regard to any particular news site.
de stijl
@Roberto:
I gave The Economist a solid shot – a 6 month subscription.
I appreciated the world coverage at first, but in a very short while I stopped reading many of the longer articles because they bored me – I don’t really need a 3 page article about the upcoming Indian elections in my life right now.
Not long after that they would sit entirely unread until I got in a frugal mood and decided that if I was paying for it, I’d better read the damn thing. That would start with reading maybe 20-30% of the content, but that soon degenerated to paging through an issue in about five minutes and tossing it on the recycle pile.
Since they put a goodly chunk of their content on economist.com for free, now I just scan the headlines once a week or so and read what piques my interest.
Derek
@Roberto:
It’s ten pages long! Hahahaha!