At Big Hollywood, Christian Toto looks at the groupthink identikit politics of men’s magazines (including Details magazine, which ran the above quote on their latest cover) and concludes, “Hey, just tell me which suit to buy and which male actor to emulate. I’ll groove on politics elsewhere.”
In other news from the world of the dead tree, Newsweek is “Giving Up”, to borrow from the blurb currently on the Drudge Report, bringing in Stephen Colbert to stunt-edit their magazine, according to John Koblin in the New York Observer:
Mr. Colbert said that the “conventional wisdom” of his earnest, super-conservative Comedy Central character will be peppered throughout the issue, which will include an essay he will write, but that much of the content in the magazine will be treated with the utmost seriousness.
“We had input into what the stories are going to be,” Mr. Colbert said
Mr. Colbert will help design the cover of the magazine, he’ll write an editor’s note and he’ll be adding annotations to Mr. Meacham’s weekly editor’s note. Mr. Colbert said that he helped hand out assignments, and will play around with columnist’s biographies and help pick out pull quotes for stories. There will be a section dedicated to all the unpublished letters to the editor Mr. Colbert has written to Newsweek since he was a kid.
In the past, guest editorships have had famously mixed results. In 1995, Tina Brown tapped Roseanne to guest-edit a feminism issue for The New Yorker. In protest, New Yorker writer Ian Frazier quit the magazine, and the whole incident has long been ridiculed as a naked publicity stunt and a low moment in the Brown–New Yorker era. One critic includes Ms. Brown herself, who told The Observer in 2007 that it was a useless enterprise and that “[Guest editors] don’t know how to get it right, any more than I would know how to commission a bunch of songs.”
Mr. Meacham, however, said his inspiration was when Bono served as guest editor of the Africa issue in Vanity Fair in July 2007.
“The notion of having someone who cares deeply about an issue and who wants to do something more than being profiled or writing a single piece has some appeal to us,” said Mr. Meacham.
When we asked Mr. Colbert about past guest editors at other books, he said, “I’m confident we’ll have mixed results! I want to be apart of that proud tradition.”
Bono, Roseanne Barr and Colbert as guest editors? In whatever astral plane they currenly inhabit, the ghosts at the Algonquin roundtable must be laughing themselves silly at the current state of the Manhattan publishing world. But in a way Colbert’s “editing” makes perfect sense; it dovetails with a question that Andrew Ferguson asked recently at the Weekly Standard in his article titled, “Some Industries Deserve Bankruptcy”:
While flipping the pages of the new Newsweek, it began to occur to everybody that, hey, this is a pretty stupid idea for a magazine. Are there really 1.5 million magazine readers–the number of subscribers Jon has promised advertisers–who want a liberal opinion magazine written by liberals who don’t want to admit they’re liberals?
And now guest edited by a liberal actor who’s performance art shtick consists of playing a conservative television pundit. Now that’s a postmodern Kabuki dance.
Update: The Analogy of the year. Heh, indeed.™
Related: Meanwhile, over at U.S. News & World Report…
Related: Sonia Schmidtt has a terrific video on the distaff side of Obama cover mania.
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