Give The People What They Want, And They’ll Come Out For It In Droves
#lastprintissue ? As Business Insider notes, “Newsweek’s Final Ever Print Cover Features A… Hashtag,” as the torch is passed from one communication medium to another.
I wonder how big a bestseller the last print issue will be? Perhaps the famous quote attributed to Red Skelton regarding infamous Hollywood mogul Harry Cohn’s packed funeral will give some hint as to how many will buy a copy for their archives. Or as the American Glob Website quipped in October when the date of Newsweek’s euthanasia was released, “So This Is How Newsweek Dies… With Thunderous Applause.”
In their Drudge-linked article, Capital New York writes, “Betrayed by the Zeitgeist she once channeled, Tina Brown invokes it one last time.” But of course, the real damage done to the magazine by not understanding the Zeitgeist was done by the magazine’s previous administration. Tina was simply duped into becoming an unwitting fall-girl for brand far, far too damaged to be salvaged.
Update: Twitchy rounds up bipartisan reaction from Twitter responding to Newsweek’s print demise; Jim Romenesko’s blog collates some Tweets mostly from the MSM. Regarding the latter post, Kathy Shaidle emails, “If only journalists were this clever when they wrote stuff intended for us lowly peons, instead of for each other on Twitter.”
Well, Newsweek tried to become a closed loop under the Washington Post — and we now know the answer to Andrew Ferguson’s query in the Weekly Standard back in 2009:
Jon offered another wonderful Meachamism in his own lead essay about President Obama.
“As he turned to make the walk back to Air Force One,” Jon wrote, “a breeze blew–and everybody scurried anew, to keep up with him. It was that kind of day–and it has been that kind of presidency: Barack Obama, moving as he wishes to move, and the world bending itself to him.”
You could just imagine everybody reading this if anybody read Newsweek. They would admire the rich, fecund gorgeousness of Jon’s prose–a breeze blew / scurried anew–and nod and tap their lower lips with their index fingers, because while everybody will say that Jon’s point is true, it isn’t. What Jon wrote, in fact, is the direct opposite of the truth. Even as the sentence was being written, the president was violating several campaign promises for the simple reason that he has had to bend himself to the world, as presidents usually do. And a good thing, too.
It was that kind of week: 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? Last week everybody looked at one another and pondered a world without Newsweek.
It’s a cruel and unforgiving Zeitgeist out there.
Someone with an actual three-digit IQ in Photoshop (unlike yours truly) should should do up that “We are All Socialists Now’ cover….. peeling, faded, torn, dust-covered….. like it would look in ‘Life After People’.
Truly an ancient relic of a bygone era, destroyed by its own ideals.
We were all socialists then. We are dead now.
And we will STILL never learn.
As skinny as the magazines got over time (and yes, I’m looking at you, too, TIME), I have to blame anorexia. Had Newsweek been eating a balanced diet of views from the whole political spectrum instead of starving itself to death on low-nutrition liberal views, it might have survived. Alas, it’s become the Karen Carpenter of magazines.
Meanwhile, funny little printed local shoppers, distributed free or for a small amount, packed from front page to back with loads of outrageous conservative opinion, lists of jailbirds, vacation real estate listings, and attractive display ads for upscale boutiques, seem to be booming in this part of the world.
And the smaller and more pitiful the Sears Wishbook gets, the larger the format of the gleaming gold foiled, 2 inch thick, Fingerhut catalog.
The people. Yes!
I recall giving up on Newsweek back in the 1990′s. The “Conventional Wisdom” pointers were utterly predictable. Always UP for Democrats, always DOWN for Republicans. The only redeeming element was George Will on the back page. But that soon became not enough to endure the maddeningly biased coverage of the magazine.
Meanwhile, I still read Maclean’s magazine, even though I’m not Canadian, because it has engaging writers and in-depth reporting.
Tina doesn’t know what happens outside the M-25, or off Manhattan island.
This could never have ended except as it did.
“Tina was simply duped into becoming an unwitting fall-girl…”
She and Susan Rice should “do lunch”.
Harry Cohn….
As I remember it, the turnout was also driven by the desire “to make sure the Old Bastard was really dead”!
Newsweek became the very definition of a low-capacity magazine, yes?
I see what you did there!
I think its interesting to compare Newsweek with The Economist. The Economist seems to be doing fine.
The Economist is usually considered right-of-center, and I think that is true on some issues, but it is not true on others (they are big defenders of the AGW theory for example). The reading level is at least collegiate, perhaps post-graduate. They don’t really cover pop culture fluff, though they have published stories about quirky things and events (which I think is a good thing).
In internet forums, I have provided links to articles from The Economist, and people who read them, from all across the political spectrum, took the news report or editorial SERIOUSLY.
So the point is, if Newsweek would have modeled themselves after The Economist–heck, even just move to the center, Newsweek would have had a better chance to survive in print.
I disagree with you about The Economist. It used to be slightly right-of-center, but now it’s not, and if you choose to read the commentaries in the online edition you’ll find that most readers seem to be lefties. The blogsites, Lexington and Democracy in America, also tend toward the left side of the political spectrum. There do not appear to be any conservatives currently writing for The Economist.
Sad to say, the Economist has fallen on intellectual Hard Times. It used to be a hothouse of Thatcherism, but of late it has grown soft with Wet Toryism and a need to please the Guardian Crowd. I don’t look forward to each issue anymore.
Although turning overtly liberal didn’t help, Newsweek would probably still have had to cease publication soon anyway if it had been completely unbiased. There’s no longer that much demand for a print magazine whose very title proclaims that it is providing you with the news from last week.
The Left learned this from the Muslims, communists, nazis, and every other brutal group that realized that a few thugs could rule millions.
A rich, fecund gorgeousness indeed.
Heaps and mounds of rich, fecund gorgeousness.
It was worse than that.
It took on a desk top publishing look. It was desktop published, I’m sure of it.
Light gray boxes with slightly darker gray text
Pink boxes with yellow text
Purple boxes with gray text
Green boxes with blue text
It was like jabbing icepicks in your eyeballs trying to read the thing, the whole time wondering what 20-something dipstick would use colors like that?
Then every now and then there would be something slightly almost interesting, something fairly well shown, some little gem. For example, just so I’m not totally negative myself, they did amuse me, I think it was Newsweek, but truth is, it might have been Time or possibly even Smithsonian, they all suffered similar thing, but I do think this was Newsweek that printed a retracing of Lewis and Clark expedition. One of those magazines did. They included bits of a journal, handwritten, and without spellcheck of course, each instance of any word that had to be sounded out to be written ended up being written multiple ways throughout the journal. The reader picks through all the bad spelling all the while going “wow for a high school grad-u-ate this guy’s spelling is atrocious” and right then the article you’re reading says
Clark’s spelling throughout the journal is
Turn page. The editors made sure the break would appear while you’re thinking to pick up with “atrocious’ they write instead
imaginative.
And you burst out laughing at the understatement, very cleverly placed.
Thank you, Newsweek for those little gems, you jokers, sad you’re gone, glad your gonem they did drive that thing right into the ground.
But being overtly liberal seem like the way to go, eh? Being anti-Jew, anti-Christian, anti-capitalism, anti-American are so en vogue at the moment…can’t blame Newsweek for singing to the choir.
An accountant might have been able to consul them on their folly.
Given their cover then -
http://jimbovard.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/socialists-now-newsweek-cover-wmark.jpg
they’ve amply demonstrated the principle that it works, till you run out of other peoples money.
Its been 10 years since I had any subscription to any magazine of any type. With the Net I just have no need for dead tree venues. If I need to travel or read on the can I have a Kindle. I see it as my way to save all the poor defenseless trees that can’t defend themselves from the plight of being sentient yet trapped with no where to run,given that they can’t.
Merry Xmas Eve everyone.Oh, and remember,just 4 more years till the “One is Done”.
Yes, but we wanted it to be over only three weeks from now!
One down, hundreds to go.
This is a case study in agency theory. The stockholders want Newsweek to maximize the returns it pays to them. The best way to do that is to write a high-quality publication that appeals to a broad audience. The writers and editors are seeking career advancement. You don’t get that appealing to the morons in flyover territory with simplistic bourgeois truth. You get ahead in the media by impressing the media elites, the unofficial campaigners, the reality-based community.
So Newsweek, like many publications, increasingly focused on appealing to a very narrow K-Street/Upper East Side/90210 crowd. That trashed the magazine’s reader base and ruined the company, but it made a lot of journolists into Big Names.
The Agents succeed by gutting the Principals. Tis a twice-told tale.
NEWSWEEK sucked so much that even leftists wouldn’t read it. Good riddance.
I quit reading Newsweek 15 years ago, but I don’t think the problem here was simply its editorial policies. All print media are collapsing. Time and the “big” newspapers are reduced to pamphlets and still losing readers. People read iPads, Kindles, smartphones, etc. They also use them to watch movies, TV shows, listen to radio, take photos, send mail and even make phone calls. I’d love to think that liberal media’s problem were all due to an awakening of the people to their silly ideas, but the populace still seems to be in the hip pocket of the Democrats. So much for Americans’ independent spirit.
I think we’re well rid of Newsweek and I hope the NYTimes follows suit. But it would be unrealistic to think this augurs much good for conservatives. Actually, I think we have more to hope for from a healthy plunge off the fiscal cliff, even though as a retiree, I stand to lose as much as anyone.
While I agree print media is in a tougher environment, that does not signal an automatic decline. The WSJ is profitable, with prospects of remaining so well into the future. While its’ focus is financial, articles in other areas are quite common. The WSJ’s strong point is verifiable, fact based reporting. There are others that stick to this rule and will probably remain solvent.
I stopped reading Newsweek some 30 yrs ago, because I didn’t like being told that my eyes were lying to me. That’s what killed it, and will kill many more.
Tina Brown’s recipe for success:
Phase 1: Have left-wing twits put out a magazine for left-wing twits that tells them what to think and, by omission, what not to think about events that happened a week ago.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!
In a world where Uncle Walter told you the way it was because the New York Time told him all the news that was fit to print, Newsweek kind of made sense. It was the final distillation and summary of the conventional wisdom to the masses. The thing is over the last 15-20 years, we’ve increasingly come to realize that the conventional wisdom Uncle Walter and the New York Times were palming off to us was little more than a glib line of BS. In that world, there is no conventional wisdom and the whinging from a bunch of reporters who have no particular knowledge of the topics they’re covering that we should accept their analysis because “all the cool people thought this” just couldn’t cut it.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,zip-ah-dee-ay . . .
Obama is inferior in every way
Wonderful feeling, wonderful day!
“…duped…” Ed Driscoll is truly a kind and sensitive man!
Good riddence.
Please take this post seriously. It is an opportunity for some enterprising right-wing group to do serious damage to the MSM, but it is very boring and simple. I’ve told many, but no one seems to get it. What is needed is a website template that can be distributed for free to local groups of volunteers that will allow them to distribute local information on weather, road closings, school events, sports scores, obituaries, and other local news for free. It could be supplemented by classified ads, also free. It should remain free of any political reporting or analysis, and be completely non-partisan. People would flock to a site like this in droves and for the most part neglect their local papers. It would further erode the view-time of the MSM. In other words, it would be the dagger to the heart of the MSM.
You are the group you have been waiting for.
As I’ve said many times over the years, the fact that Newsweek wasn’t ashamed and embarrassed to have Eleanor Clift’s name on the masthead was enough for me. She is one of the nastiest, shrillest, most wrongheaded people I’ve ever watched on TV.
No publication associated with Clift could be worth reading much less paying for,
To paraphrase Robertson Davies about another demise, “…an event too long deferred…”
Newsweek was being given to Dentists, Doctors and Lawyers and others for their waiting rooms and so became “waiting room magazines” to be casually perused if at all and thrown aside as soon as your name was called. Time belongs in that group too. Neither magazine was worth paying for or being taken seriously.
What a material of un-ambiguity and preserveness of valuable experience
regarding unpredicted emotions.