James Wolcott recently wrote:
What’s the point of disagreeing with something you agree with simply to model your counterintuitive ironies in the mirror in the hope of meeting Marty Peretz some enchanted evening? We must rid of minds of such frippery.
TNR/Slate is the epicenter of this of course, but it’s been pretty prevalent in Time, Newsweek, and the other weeklies for years, as well, often in different forms, such as Newsweek’s truly awful CW indicator. I wonder if this (from James Fallows) is part of the reason why:
One thing I learned during my stint as a weekly news magazine editor* was how deceptively difficult this kind of journalism has become. Story selection? For a daily newspaper, it’s easier. If there is a big airplane crash on Monday, you write about it on Tuesday.
Daily newspapers and single-interest publications have a natural context for most of what they write, e.g. “here’s stuff that happened yesterday” or “here’s some new stuff related to this single interest.” Weeklies don’t. And I wonder if a lot of the time, they fall back on situating their articles relative to conventional wisdom in order to create context. “Rahm Emanuel tries hard, Rahm Emanuel screws a bunch of things up” feels like an intellectual non sequitur, but “Old CW — Rahm is the bomb, New CW — Rahm bombs!” creates some kind of understandable narrative, however idiotic. Similarly “The economy is bad” feels boring and superfluous; “The Economy: It’s Worse Than You (Or Most Economists) Think” works better for a weekly.
It’s the same with their cultural coverage. Newsweek can’t write “The local production of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change was enjoyable”, because there is no local production for them, so they have to go with “Five Edgy Young Playwrights To Watch in 2010!”, they can’t write “here’s a profile of a musician who is playing at a local venue this weekend”, they have to write “Emo! (It’s More Than Just Pants)”, etc. etc.
So maybe it’s not anyone’s fault that Time, Newsweek, TNR, and the rest are as awful as they are. Without a natural context, they are reduced to playing silly rhetorical games. It’s likely that the new media environment, where everyone has read about the story long before it appears in Time or Newsweek, exacerbates this. But they are awful now and we’ll be better when they all disappear.
Update. An interesting comment from Noonan (no, not that one):
As someone who has worked at a weekly lemme refer to this as the Disease of More. The āmoreā in question is time. While a weekly has more time than a daily to report out a story, its editors often find more time to float their own ideas. When you see some ridiculous CW story it more often than not came directly from an editorās desk. And who the hell knows where the editor (read: former reporter) got the idea. But you can bet it stemmed from a conversation over drinks on a Saturday night or an interesting tidbit picked up while listening to NPR on the way into work. It sure as hell didnāt come from talking to sources.
Instead of actually using the abundance of time a weekly has at its disposal to do better reporting and get the fuck out of the office and into the field, places like Newsweek have decided instead to publish what amounts to Think Tank-style whitepapers on whatever the counterintuitive wanking of the moment is. Itās a serious misallocation of resources. As for how it started, I have no idea. But here we are. And screw Jon Meacham for thinking heās part of the solution.
Clambone
Emo is, in fact, just pants. (YA BURNT, EMO!)
DFS
I thought it was just hairdos. But I’m twice those kids’ age, so who knows.
El Cid
I’m sorry. I don’t see any reason why it’s supposed to be so hard to look at a combination of events this past week, events upcoming the next week, and ongoing issues and determining which ones seem to be important and significant and which ones don’t.
Weekly science magazines don’t seem to be crippled by filling themselves up with irrelevant bullshit, neither do car or sports magazines.
ChockFullO'Nuts
What will replace them?
Them, and the newspapers that are dropping like flies. And the network 30 minute newsers that are losing audience. And the cable networks that are losing share to House reruns.
MattR
Not sure if you saw Jon Stewart’s interview with Jon Meachem. Meachem was saying that his vision for the future of a weekly new magazine was to make the daily articles on the website the focal point and then make the magazine a “best of” wrapup of the week’s events for those who want/like to have a physical copy to read. I am not sure if it will work, but it seems to recognize the issue that you and Fallows wrote about.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@El Cid: Those are “single issue” publications. Science, cars, sports, nearly nekkid wimmin (but I repeat myself)… single issues, every one.
cleek
right.
any “news” product with a production time greater than a day almost has to become a meta- news product. and to do that, it has to come up with novel ways of talking about yesterday’s news. the contrarian story is one way to talk about yesterday’s news, and so is fitting yesterday’s news into a ready-made narrative. these are both much easier than going out to find the real narrative arcs behind the stories – actual investigative journalism.
stuckinred
Times Square is evacuated again.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Oh, it’s someone’s fault, and we could all either name them or recognize the names. Just look at Time’s most recent “100 influential people” thing: Sarah Palin is more influential than SoS Hillary Clinton, and Palin’s profile was written by Ted Nugent. That kinda says it all about Time/Newsweek.
As an old fart who has trouble reading long form articles on computers (though I’m thinking of giving either Kindle or an iPad a try), I still by a dead tree mag from time to time, usually the Atlantic, NYer or some such. The last dt Newsweek I bought was in Dec 08, when they did a pretty good pair of longish articles on the McCain and Obama campaigns, from the primaries through election day– a less gossipy version of the Halperin book in ten pages instead of three hundred. The last time I bough a dt Time… can’t remember. I think there’s a place for deeper, explanatory writing on politics, if whichever billionaire buys Newsweek (Haim Saban or Pete Peterson! party on!) is willing to accept a single digit return in exchange for the vanity of seeing Henry Luce when s/he looks in a mirror.
mako
Hmph, now that we have blogs who needs newsmagazines?
Newspapers too, are overrated.
MattR
@stuckinred: CNN reports all clear.
Occasional Reader
The Economist, of course, is the big exception. And I think your quote above gets to the heart of why. Whether you agree or disagree with the Economist’s point of view, at least it has one that it sticks to consistently – even when it requires challenging the conventional wisdom.
I don’t understand why one of the struggling US news weeklies doesn’t try applying the Economist’s approach in a US-specific context. Why doesn’t Newsweek divide up the US by geography – “The Midwest”, “The East Coast,” “The South” etc in place of the Economist’s “The Americas,” “Europe,” etc. and produce weekly, opinionated (and occasionally confrontational) reporting and analysis about US political and business news from around the country.
None of the major US news mags really writes consistently and engagingly about what education wonks are trying to reduce dropout rates in the Midwest, or how Baltimore’s policy on XYZ might be applied to some problem in California. To survive, the US weeklies have got to get beyond being just a throwaway waiting room read. People might just go for it – they’re certainly not going for the status quo!
Alex S.
Maybe our time has become too fast for weeklies, i.e. if people want to read news stories they completely focus on dailies. Weeklies have to find another purpose, and as the slower format, they have specialized on more extended cognitive processes. Or in other words, weeklies think their purpose is to make people think more than they do on a daily basis – and that leads to artificial contrarianism, the automatic thinking-from-another-point-of-view-angle.
licensed to kill time
I’m getting a big red banner across the MSNBC site:
“Breaking News: NYC police evacuate Times Square below 47th St due to a suspicious package”
Huh. There have been a few freakouts in the last few days that came to nothing, hope this is just another one.
ETA: AND I see you guys have been there, done that!
MattR
@MattR: Or apparently not. CNN now says the all clear was related to a previous incident from 3 hours ago in Times Square. And this incident is still under investiagtion. Nice job CNN.
chopper
emo is more than just pants. it’s shoes as well, staring at shoes.
Midnight Marauder
I mean, it is definitely someone’s fault that they are as awful as they are, and it is clearly the people who have been running those magazines over the years. So I guess what I’m saying is that this is in large part a situation of their own doing. And certainly, the emergence of new media exacerbates the issue, but on their own, these publications are also fundamentally terrible products.
Eventually, that kind of thing catches up with you.
jeffreyw
It seems to me the Newsweek et al would be better off to track stories as they mature. They’ll never be breaking news publications but once they pick up a story they should revisit it periodically for updates and place it into a “what this may mean for you” narrative. Plenty of room to compare the particular with the general and to place it into context. Also there would be opportunity to offer space to competing narratives. They just need to remember that there are often more than two sides and be wary of partisan and/or personal interests. I sure don’t want to see an article’s author described as: “Newt Gingrich is a history professor who writes about stuff.”
wag
It seems to me that, with its re-branding attempt of the past year, Newsweek has tried to bridge the gap between the monthly commentary publications (The Atlantic comes to mind), and a standard weekly. They have occasionally succeeded, but more often come across as Atlantic-lite (I like the Atlantic). They haven’t had the guts to go Full Metal New Yorker (and I love the New Yorker (go Sy!!!)). Its really too bad, becasue, as stated in a prvious thread, Newsweek did fill a great niche for many years.
mistermix
The important part of Fallows’ quote is “has become”. When these weeklies were created (20s/30s) the competition was the daily. Into the 80’s TV was a pretty weak competitor. So, just rounding up the week’s news was still good enough. Not anymore. Now they’ve got so much competition that they need to carve out an ever-smaller niche.
That’s why you get shit like this:
“Jesus: Was He Gay? The New Science”
Which I would believe as an actual cover.
http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/05/the-ultimate-newsweek-cover-line-updated-again/56270/
zmulls
I think that’s it in a nutshell, more than anything else. You can keep up with everything in real time, including reactions across the whatever-o-sphere. You’ve already read the facts, the analysis, the post-analysis, the predictions and seen the YouTube parodies before you’ve had lunch.
Roger Ebert’s recent column on why blog-based movie criticism was wonderful and how paid movie criticism was not only doomed, but for good reason — is a must-read. It touches on tons of issues facing print journalism, and it emphasizes that this change is inevitable.
Effective investigative journalism is the one wild card in all this and I still haven’t been able to envision a model in which it survives the way I want it to)
wrb
I don’t quite buy these excuses primarily for one reason- The Economist.
It’s format is pretty close to that of Time and Newsweek but they don’t pander and the magazine is excellent.
I think the pandering has been a big part of the problem.
In addition, The New Yorker manages to cover and break a lot of news in a weekly format, albeit a quite different one.
Hob
Post title nitpick: the song goes “you got Time and Newsweek”, not “you got Time, you got Newsweek”.
DougJ
@Hob:
Thanks. I remembered it wrong.
BombIranForChrist
Weekly magazines are basically carnival barkers. They tempt you with things that seem outrageous, but when you go inside the tent, you are rarely impressed.
That’s a big reason why I just can’t get into Slate. I actually love their podcasts, except for the execrable New Disruptors one, so I try to read their website, but man … the articles just suck. They promise some wild, counterintuitive wisdom, but there is rarely a payoff. I think they would do better to follow their podcasts’ lead and just talk intelligently about intelligent topics, and if their opinion just happens to be CW, well so be it! They may think that wacky sounding lead ins draw eyeballs to their site, but you can’t build an organization on suck.
Noonan
As someone who has worked at a weekly lemme refer to this as the Disease of More. The “more” in question is time. While a weekly has more time than a daily to report out a story, its editors often find more time to float their own ideas. When you see some ridiculous CW story it more often than not came directly from an editor’s desk. And who the hell knows where the editor (read: former reporter) got the idea. But you can bet it stemmed from a conversation over drinks on a Saturday night or an interesting tidbit picked up while listening to NPR on the way into work. It sure as hell didnāt come from talking to sources.
Instead of actually using the abundance of time a weekly has at its disposal to do better reporting and get the fuck out of the office and into the field, places like Newsweek have decided instead to publish what amounts to Think Tank-style whitepapers on whatever the counterintuitive wanking of the moment is. Itās a serious misallocation of resources. As for how it started, I have no idea. But here we are. And screw Jon Meacham for thinking heās part of the solution.
Capri
When Newsweek and Time dumped the in-depth stuff and kept the fluff the did the same as a politician tracking to the right – alienate their base in order to woo people who want to see read articles that are 500 words or less and have the vocabulary of an 8th grader, i.e. the people who are not going to buy any magazine.
IMHO they best model they could use is Paul Harvey. They could give their readers “the rest of the story” by fleshing out and going into depth on issues of the day.
maus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It’s true if you consider that the list is more reflective of media obsession than actual power and acumen. Also that she’s dumb enough that the media has finally found someone post-Bush that they can feel smarter than.
licensed to kill time
Time and Newsweek have become the USA Today of weekly mags. They will never have the long form content rich articles we crave, because they are primarily a newsinfotainment business that competes with People magazine and silly eye catching covers. They have dumbed down their writing to a point where any thinking person just throws them down in exasperation.
They used to have their place in a world that moved more slowly, and a weekly news summary was an important source of information. Those days are long gone.
maus
@licensed to kill time:
Can we do the same with cable news and CNN, now that they’re regurgitating the same unimportant stories over and over? I’d sure like that, if they’re not willing to prioritize stories based on how they actually affect the American people.
MattR
@MattR: And now CNN says that everything is clear in Times Square and everything is reopened. The cause of all the hubbub: a cooler filled with water bottles.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@maus: IT’s a hoot watching Conserva-Bloggers and MSMers try to explain why Palin endorsed the ideological plastic grocery sack that is Carly Fiorina over the hard right state leg-er. “It’s almost as if she doesn’t really stand for anything!”
That whole Time 100 illustrates the side of the weeklies’ problem. What real news they cover is lazy center-right CW occasionally spiced with the just as lazy contrarianism shite. If Newsweek’s best bet is, as I think, to make itself into what wag called “Atlantic-lite”, Time’s problem is that they want to be “People-Plus”, right down to the sad party they threw themselves so that Piper Palin and Rick Stengel could get their pictures taken with Ashton Kutcher.
Kyle
CNN International has traces of intelligent thought, so they have no fucking excuse for the dumbass newstainment swill they broadcast in the US.
The international editions of Time and Newsweek were far superior when I lived overseas in the 80s.
What clearer indication that their attitude is, “Americans are stupider than people other countries.” Feed us corporatist tripe because we don’t know any better, the advertisers love it, and some teabag drooler in Kentucky might complain that his brain hurts when you use big words.
licensed to kill time
@maus:
Well, I turn off the cable news in exasperation all the time for the reasons you mention. 24/7 cable news has dumbed down news coverage just like the weekly mags.
I think a thoughtful weekend summary of the news that actually affects Americans (and the world) would be a grand thing. I doubt that we are likely to get it. They are all in the infotainment mode now, with ratings and profits ruling the coverage.
It’s showbiz, Jake. Forget about it.
Elizabelle
@licensed to kill time:
In all honesty, I think USA Today provides some interesting stories. Don’t subscribe, but am frequently pleasantly surprised while traveling.
Time and Newsweek deserve to be gone, period, at least in their dead tree format. They don’t provide enough value, and I hate the “cutesy” writing they attempt, particularly on modern culture, in their desperation to be relevant.
Hate Newsweek’s graphic redesign: the whole thing looks like a Big Pharma advertising insert to me.
JK
OT
Oh, Mann: Cuccinelli targets UVA papers in Climategate salvo
http://www.readthehook.com/blog/index.php/2010/04/29/oh-mann-cuccinelli-targets-uva-papers-in-climategate-salvo
DougJ
@Elizabelle:
I’m not a USA Today hater either. It’s not the Times, but I think it’s fine for the most part.
El Cid
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko: How is “science” a single issue? And why is it now difficult for newsmagazines to have editorial board meetings in the United States — but not in other countries, where it seems to be quite possible — where you exercise professional judgment on which issues are the most crucial to cover?
This notion that ‘this is just too haaaard’ is staggering to me.
de stijl
@Hob:
@DougJ:
Hey, now! Have you watched True Stories lately? People like us would definitely say that the preacher channels a proto-Glenn Beck.
Here is the puzzling evidence.
Damn, that is such a great movie! Just thinking about it will get a bunch of great songs stuck in my cranium for the next week. Dream Operator is playing on my wetware Ipod right now.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Noonan:
Al Franken told a story on his old radio show about his brief tenure at Newsweek, a certain “very conservative editor” had a real problem with Franken’s irreverent style. I’ve always assumed that was the Good Parson. I’m sure that ideology played a role, but I suspect that Parson Meacham was at least as troubled by Franken’s lack of reverence for The Establishment.
Waldo
Sure, the weeklies have to go through ridiculous contortions to appear newsworthy, but their demise will be nothing to celebrate. I won’t miss the fake trend stories, but I do find the shrinking pool of reporters gathering news on the national and international levels very troubling.
Elizabelle
Yeah, I was surprised to learn that Meachum was (allegedly) modeling Newsweek after The Economist. Never occurred to me. Other than being printed in four color on magazine stock, and mailed to subscribers …
Agree, The Economist’s writing is lively, incisive and directed to the intelligent reader.
Newsweek? Too much Palin coverage and shallow conventional “wisdom”.
maus
@Waldo:
What’s the point if they’re glorified AP/Reuters? They have no more independence, relevance, nor are they strong of character enough to sway the populace when it comes to protecting us against the neocons and corporate astroturfing.
maus
@de stijl:
Brother Justin from Carnivale? :p
de stijl
@MattR:
So, in other words, we dodged another bullet.
When will Obama realize that we can’t rely on luck as our comprehensive anti-terror plan?
sneezy
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
“As an old fart who has trouble reading long form articles on computers (though Iām thinking of giving either Kindle or an iPad a try)…”
Check out http://readability.com. At a guess, I use it on about half of what I read online and it makes a huge difference.
Tazistan Jen
I don’t buy it because of The New Yorker. It has all the issues you list for Time and Newsweek and yet it isn’t puerile and inane beyond human endurance very often.
redactor
I read Newsweek back in the ’60s and ’70s, when I lived in the Midwest. In a time of no Internet and only the Wall Street Journal as a national newspaper, it provided a decent weekly digest of the big stories from the NYT and WaPo, and it offered more international coverage than the dailies in flyover country.
I don’t put TNR in the same category as Time and Newsweek for the simple reason that it has never been other than an opinion publication and nowadays more of a vanity press for Marty Peretz’s ravings. It is still occasionally worthwhile for the writers it fosters, but I can’t bring myself to subscribe anymore.
I will confess that I find the Economist too much on a weekly basis. Ditto the New Yorker. Both, however, are on the right track in that they provide substance and context. An American newsweekly that did so and covered a few stories that didn’t appear in the papers would still be providing a service, the Internet notwithstanding.
Wait, come to think of it, there is the Nation. It doesn’t hide its liberal perspective, but it provides at least as much straight reporting as opinion. And it’s short enough to read every week without becoming a duty.
aimai
@maus:
Carnivale! Of sainted memory.
aimai
eric
@redactor: The Nation is perhaps successful because there so few places to get thoughtful and timely opinion without a significant corporatist bias. Plus, there are news stories out there that the corporate media just wont report. Plus, the Nation is not looking at trying to make a bajillion dollars.
eric
Toast
If you strip out the foreign policy stuff, TNR’s actually a pretty damned good read. Chait’s sharp as a tack, Cohn had by far the best take on the HCR debate, and they’ve got a stable of regulars who churn out legitimately thought-provoking pieces. I don’t think they’re even remotely similar to Slate, which is mostly silly contrarianism and lightweight fluff. (Although I love, love, love their Political Gabfest.)
The Truffle
@eric: How well is the Nation doing?