Wave of the Present: Newsweek Edition
Newsweek, sold for $1 a couple of years ago, is finally making good on its threat to can its print edition and soldier on in digital-only format. Does anyone care? Probably not. Not even the high-octane, buzz-oriented editorship of Tina Brown could salvage the venerable newsweekly, which began publication eight decades ago. Niall Ferguson made some waves when, a couple months ago, he wrote a cover story for the magazine explaining “Why Obama Needs to Go.” But such forthright, counter-establishment stories have been rare in Newsweek, which mostly offers the same politically correct pabulum readers can find in other organs of the formerly mainstream (now legacy) media. The Wall Street Journal, quoting a company press release, reported that Newsweek Global, as the successor (not to say posthumous) publication will be called, will offer “a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading, left-wing audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context.” It’s possible that the phrase “left-wing” was missing from some versions of that statement.
Tina Brown is quite right that the economics of print publication and distribution are “challenging.” We are in the middle — or rather, we are at the beginning — of a technological revolution that will change, is changing, the format of publishing. Print on paper is not going to disappear: I am confident about that. But it is going to be decisively supplemented, where it is not in fact replaced, by digital alternatives.
Traditionalists like me are apt to regard this change with regret. Is it not yet another assault on literacy, on the world of culture that the wide dissemination of books made possible? Maybe, at least in part. I think that the classicist John Herington was onto something when he recalled, in an essay called “Possessing the Golden Key” (1997), some “conservative-minded wit” who, in the early 1960s, put about a rumor about an amazing new technological device.
It was the key to everything you could possibly need to know, and yet it could be carried in the hand and needed no cords or batteries; it had no name as yet, but provisionally it was being called Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge, or BOOK for short.
Alas, the assumptions behind that joke — assumptions that had prevailed in Western culture at least since the time of the Greeks — are no longer so certain. “Anyone who sets out to predict any aspect of future society,” Herington noted,
must begin by acknowledging that we are now in the midst of a cultural transition compared to which the transitions from oral to written literature, and from manuscript to print, may prove to have been quite minor affairs. . . . Is the book likely to preserve its primacy, or even, in the long run, its existence as an instrument of education or entertainment? Will the word (whether spoken or printed or just looming greenly on a computer screen) be able to make headway against the roaring torrent of visual images?
Herington ends on a note of cautious optimism (perhaps more cautious than optimistic, especially about that traditional bastion of liberal learning, the university), but I believe his governing questions are more pressing now, fifteen years on, than ever.
Today while riding the commuter train home, I saw deer grazing in a meadow surrounded by forest. The train was speeding the trees and grass, creating an anesthetic green blur when my eyes caught brown movement and my primeval brain took over, immediately focusing my eyes on the deer. My reaction was autonomic and startlingly so; I could see the deer with a clarity my eyes usually don’t provide.
The point? There’s a lot of stuff built into our minds that can be programmed once it’s better understood. Just like spotting prey pulled me out of relaxing reverie, so could a properly primed mind focus me on stuff I’ve told it I want to consider. Most of the information battering our consciousnesses is burdensome, even offensive in its sheer volume. One way of protecting one’s peace of mind is to never pick up a print newspaper. It’s not so much a cultural thing as a self-protection and time-management thing. Sorry print, but you’re not a deer.
Such a paean to literacy should be reserved for the demise of something more meaningful than sNuzweek. Say, when Oxford decides to shut down its imprimatur and abandon the OED.
Maybe they should forget about targeting any wings and just report the facts.
I know it sounds crazy but it could work.
How much information is lost to archaic technology? Want to read that document you saved on your floppy disk in college? No, not the 3.5 inch format, you still might be able to find a floppy drive that can read single and double sided floppies at Best Buy. If the disk is still readable. I’m talking 5.25″ disks.
At least with print there’s something on the page to read. It might last 100 years, too. Gosh, even longer. Zardoz long.
I’m reminded of a 70′s Steve Martin bit where an entire library has been cleared out and all the books have been transferred to microfiche, the technology of the future, which Martin holds up to look at and lights a Bic behind it to illuminate it, then, poof.
On the other hand, I’ll be happy if all my college papers are lost to history.
Don’t worry. They are. And so are mine.
One thing that remains constant re the Human Condition (incredible technological advances notwithstanding) is that very, very few of us are remembered for more than a couple generations after our passings. The world moves on, and misses us not in the slightest. But rest assured, the story of our successors will be no more compelling than our own. And their souls will follow directly behind us, in the absolute miracle that is life.
Flashback: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
Captain James T. Kirk: They’re animals.
Captain Spock: Jim, there is an historic opportunity here.
Captain James T. Kirk: Don’t believe them. Don’t trust them.
Captain Spock: They’re dying.
Captain James T. Kirk: Let them die!
Well actually, I don’t subscribe to the dead tree National Review or Weekly Standard either. I sometimes buy and read the paper WSJ.
In theory I would love a well-edited weekly or even monthly hard-copy political/news journal – as long as they had fast turn-around times. In theory. In practice, I dunno. It requires finding time to sit down and read. Most of us have lost the habit, if we ever had it, except for either academic or entertainment purposes.
It’s hard to understand just how and why Newsweak became such a knee-jerk publication, but needing faster turnaround might be part of the reason, easier to recite dogma you don’t have to research or check or even think through. But we’ve become such a knee-jerk society, what could they do, I suppose, but follow and take the consequences.
That’s a question for archeologists, Josh. It was being called “Newspeak magazine” at least as far back as the Nixon presidency.
I would just like to wish the new fully-digital *Newsweek* all the ill-luck in the world. I think you people suck, and I will never click onto your website — just as I never click onto the NYT or any other Old Media fishwrap. B-bye.
It takes a liberal to run a publication into the ground.
There are several irreversible movements going on within journalism. On this unimportant topic, Newsweek is going out of business simply because it is not very good. Many decades ago, those who owned massive printing monopolies, or oligopolies, could sink to any level and still make a profit. Colliers, the Saturday Evening Post, and Life died but Time and Newsweek, and a few others controlled a market. The three networks similarly held a straggle hold on TV. The internet, and competitors like Fox News broke the monopoly. In a similar evolution, in an earlier era, the Model T and paved roads broke the monopoly of the company store. Families piled into the car on Saturday night and drove to the next town to the A&P, the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. A quality product at a low price, is the result of real competition. Newsweek failed that survival test.
For a decade, I assessed advanced technology using the web. One day, I read two related State of the Art papers on the same topic. One came from the Cavendish Lab, U of Cambridge UK, the other from the U of Singapore. I emailed a follow on question to both authors, who responded in the same working day. Within an hour, I completed my report and filed it via email, certain that on this narrow topic, I knew more than any human being on this earth, for about one hour. A century ago, it may have been a chapter in a text book, filed under the taxonomy of the Library of Congress. Today, there are entire disciplines of which the Lib of Congress knows nothing, and people now consider the date and time stamp as the publication time defining original authorship.
I am reading the City of God, by St. Augustine in my Kindle. It is 22 books long, easily fits in memory and his thoughts are as fresh as any newspaper in America.
Synthesizing the above, I hold that America produces ignorant college graduates, particularly lousy journalists, whose production is not worth reading, that the rate of knowledge gain is increasing exponentially, and those who value concepts live in a new age. I no longer read the NYT for all of the above reasons. Newsweek is just another dinosaur to roll over.
If the above was not true, Obama would have never been elected, but he was. His Presidency is the result of nonthinking voters. This is death to any democracy. It was aided to some degree by Newsweek. This is the cost of that publication.
These folks are simply out of touch with reality. What makes them think they can compete on the Internet with the cr*p they regurgitate. They won’t last a year.
All digital, all online is the way of the future. We should embrace it with gusto, at least until the power goes off….
Yeah. And then we can go back to clubbing liberal pussies over the head, as Nature always intended.
When I was in college many decades ago, Newsweek used to distinguish itself by saying that it separated fact from opinion. Alas, as Leftists (who call themselves, liberal) came to dominate the magazine, opinion and fact were no longer separated, and opinion was presented as fact. I suppose that eventually a good chunk of the reading public realized that the magazine’s facts were unmoored from reality, and so began to abandon it. Newsweek’s experience will probably be repeated with other print media, as well as with tv media (think ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC). Eventually, I would not be surprised to see other major names end up in the same boat. At some point, what’s left of the Leftist media may come to its senses and present the news straight, but I have my doubts. BTW Along those lines, see Jeff Lord’s analysis in the American Spectator at, http://spectator.org/archives/2012/10/18/the-candy-crowley-tipping-poin .
I see the same thing coming.
Of course all the senior fat cats in the liberal news biz are all getting on in years — I mean, just look at these clowns; they’ve all made their personal haul; they’re all millionaires living high off the hog.
Bob Schieffer (who is now roughly the same age that the late Walter Cronkite would be today) will be “moderating” the third and final presidential debate, and he will follow suit with Jim Lehrer, and Martha what’s-her-name, and Candy (sic) Crowley (reminds me of that Gary Larson cartoon with the fat lady and the candy store) in furthering the liberal agenda to defend and advantage Barack at all costs. And really, what does ol’ Bob have to lose by throwing all professional journalistic decency to the wind? After Candy gave the boy emperor 9% more time over his rival to speak, I’m sure that Bob will be even more generous to the incumbent.
These people don’t care. Just as liberals don’t care about the crushing debt that is being placed on future American generations. They’ve got theirs and TO HELL with all the dumbasses who have consumed their product over the past decades. Bob will soon be retiring to his lavish beach home in Bora Bora, Martha to her mansion in the vineyard, and Candy to her ginger-bread castle somewhere in the Swiss Alps.
Dr. Frank: Spot-on. Just one thing. I have pet peeve about describing such people as liberal. They are anything but liberal. My preferred term is “Leftist.”
We’re disintermediating the gatekeepers.
As the great American philosopher Nelson Mundt says, “HA, ha!”
The worst investment Harman Kardon has ever made. Too bad for them, I own a Revel Gem and they are truly wonderful speakers. Can’t figure out how such a renowned company would be or would want to be involved with a “progressive” rag like Newsweek.
I suspect he was anticipating a federal bailout, a la GM and Chrysler. Then he would sell the rag at a huge profit.
But then the Grim Reaper intervened. “Harman, your time is up!” :-O
” assuming, that is, that we muster the effort to make good the loss.”
Is the case of Newsweek, the loss IS good.
Is Time still in print? I canceled subscriptions to both time and Newsweek during the Clinton years. They both drifted away from news and into views, and they tried for a while to be subtle about it. When you come to a site like PJ media, if you are unaware that there is a conservative bias here in 5 minutes, you have to be daft. Newsweek and Time both tried to hide it and slide it into your way of thinking.
I would sometimes buy Newsweek just to see what kind of bad economics and political spin they were putting on the big stories, sort of reading enemy propaganda to gauge what they are thinking (or with liberals emoting). It usually took me quite a while to read through it because the lies, distortions and just plain bad information was so infuriating I’d read a little, get up and walk off some frustration and start again later. There’s only so much BS one can take at a time.
This is terrible: My parakeets loved to defecate on Newsweek! Oh well, there’s still the NY Times!