Mickey Kaus spots Newsweek taking an artistic pause of sorts. Or as he writes, “Newsweek Maintains Meaningful Silence:”
The Newsweek with the “Apocalypse Now” cover (featuring a giant wave) is apparently a double issue, meaning it will sit on the stands this week while competitors produce fresh editions. An alert emailer writes:
Can you imagine … what people would be saying if any Newsweek editor other than Tina Brown had taken a week off (because of a special “tsunami” double issue) during a time of HUGE war news and furious war debate. In the old days, Newsweek would have simply reversed itself and hustled out an issue.
That tsunami cover just sits there, dead, on the newsstand …
So “hot”!
I can think of circumstances in which an editor might find skipping a week appealing enough to justify missing some news–say, if printing and distributing each issue put you many thousands of dollars further in the hole. …
Actually, Brown missed a golden opportunity to credit the paper’s silence on Earth Hour. She could have put out a self-aggrandizing press release that began “in order to save on resources, and save on paper, we’re suspending the magazine for a week,” and thus get a fair amount of sympathetic PR from her time out.
Of course, that would lead many to want her magazine to take a time out more often. Or perhaps permanently. Save the trees, Tina!
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