Newsweek Magazine

Rating:	★★
Category:	Other

I have been a regular subscriber to "Newsweek" for the past thirty years. Although I never relied on it to give me more than a primary source of national and international news and commentary, I always got what I felt was a good cross-section of solid reporting from journalists in many of their two dozen bureaus around the world.

Since May of 2009, however, the New York-based magazine has underwent a complete makeover. According to managing editor Jon Meachem, this was supposed to make the news weekly more engaging to the subscriber.

What it has done in reality is simply reduce the amount of in-depth news coverage in favor of a more like the old lightweight "Life" Magazine style of photo-happy periodicals of the past---with lots more big pictures that take up two pages to introduce a three-page story, for instance, as happened recently with an article on the Catholic Church and its role in covering recent pederast scandals. The story was short, but there was a big photo of the Virgin Mary. Go figure

This is all we don't need in the world--more fourth estate pandering to advertisers, major stories reduced to dumbed-down snippets and a higher amount of celebrity head shots and "guest columnists" like Christopher Hitchens or Henry Kissinger doing an ax job on some old enemies.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the U.S. circulation of the once-solid weekly has been cut in half in terms of subscribers in the last two years. Apparently the editors started laying off staff reporters in late 2008, leaving its core commentators. Paradoxically, the publishers have stated they plan to RAISE the subscription price to attract a more well-heeled clientele for their advertisers.

James Robinson of "The Guardian" explained part of this--to me, flawed--strategy in a May 2009 story:

"Newsweek has publicly conceded it no longer has the money for labour-intensive reporting, and comment is cheaper to produce than news, but the ex-staffer claims the strategic shift has not been prompted solely by commercial considerations. {An ex staffer said} "It's economic reality combined with a philosophy that existed years before those realities become apparent. I don't think it's going to work. Too many other titles are doing a similar thing."

"The key challenge facing both titles is how to maintain readership at a time when more people are getting their news online, the same problem newspapers have been grappling with since the turn of the century. Meachem acknowledged the dynamics of the news industry had changed several years ago, telling the American Journalism Review in 2007: "What's happening now is that headlines are delivered by the web. That has pushed newspapers to become more like the news magazines were in 1982, and it's pushed the news magazines to produce a monthly-quality product on a weekly basis, and it's pushed the monthlies into the place of the great quarterlies, and the quarterlies have become books."



What has gone wrong?

Like all media outlets, Post-Newsweek has been hit by the power of the Internet to attract eyeballs away from old-style magazines. But the reporting that Newsweek once supplied is ever more vital in a world where there are so many pundits and professional bloggers and ever fewer professional journalists who can do old-fashioned things like gather information.

My fear is we are being left in a world that is increasingly full of media hacks sitting about and pontificating and leaving the news consumer more and more bereft of facts to serve the purpose of personal critical thinking. There is, in truth, no substitute for journalistic experience and training and just watching television news (which is a joke, at least on many of the 24-Hour News stations) is an exercise in bias and special pleading. And having editorial writers is little help when they seem more and more to be writing the same three or four editorials over and over again, changing the names and the sentence structure a bit here and there to cover their tracks.

George Will and Robert Samuelson are two of the main columnists who indulge in pattern-pontificating. It was in spite of and not because of their work that I had been a faithful reader. And will continue to be I suspect...until my subscription lapses next year.

Without fact-gatherers and editorial staff sifting through the work to bring out the clearest story-lines, we are all the more ignorant of what is happening in the world regardless of where we sit in on the globe.

Hopefully other periodicals like "The Economist" will pick up the slack that the new thinner (by twenty pages on average) and glitzier Newsweek has now embarked on. We can only hope.