[The editor of Newsweek]… ignored the truth that the old newsmagazine editors lived by: journalists who write to satisfy people like themselves will soon run out of readers. The magazine that lies dying in Don Graham’s arms violated this rule week by week.
To cite one obvious example: newsweeklies annually marked Christian holidays with a cover story on a religious theme, always respectful and sometimes celebratory in tone. I’m sure it was a strain, an exercise in self-denial; few journalists are religious in any conventional sense. The new Newsweek, by contrast, published holiday issues that any good secular journalist would like to read. One issue near Christmas offered a long and fallacious cover story on “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage.” Easter came and the magazine feted “The End of Christian America.” Pieces like this weren’t so much a challenge to traditionally religious readers as a declaration of war. Why not just put a bullet in the Easter Bunny while you’re at it?
I’m picking through the lint beneath the seat cushion even while I type. Six dollars! Just six dollars in change is all I need to be able to purchase a magazine designed to not give me what I want to read.
I’m surprised no other enterprises adopt this business model. Of course, I remember when Baskin-Robbins introduced introduced ” Tuna Caramel Sherbet. That was kinda the same thing.
[blockquote]each turn of the ratchet moved the form further away from the kind of magazine that people want to read and closer to the kind of magazine that journalists want to write.[/blockquote] Exactly! And, true to form, what do journalists say when they discover readers don’t want to read the kind of magazine that journalists want to write? They say “Our readers are morons who are too stupid to appreciate either the quality or the importance of our work.” [blockquote]“Let me say this,†[Jon Meacham] said, portentousness rising. “I don’t think we’re the only catcher in the rye between democracy and ignorance, but I think we’re one of them, and I don’t think there are that many standing on the edge of that cliff.â€[/blockquote] You can see the same thing on C-Span when journalists get together to discuss the sorry state of their industry. “Our readers are morons!” You can find it in any odd issue of Columbia Journalism Review. “Our readers are morons!” It is an omnipresent certainty among journalists that they have be especially selected to lead the ignorant masses by whatever it is that secularists substitute for Providence. The fault never lies with the sainted journalistic priests of democracy, but always with the faithless laity who do not offer tithes for the support of the priesthood.
I will dance on the grave of [i]Newsweek[/i]. I will kill the fatted calf in celebration, and drink a toast to its well-deserved demise.
carl
The mention of the Easter topic makes me recall TEC’s Generalissimus Bishop’s Easter Sermon on the dangers of cowf*rts.
and for two years I have been throwing my mother’s subscription renewal notices in the trash.
finally, an analysis that explains why Dear Old Dad cancelled his TIME subscription years ago!
Six dollars weekly for pretentious minority opinions didn’t sell enough subscriptions? Imagine that. When the “news magazines” became opinion magazines, their subscription rates dropped down to the levels of the other opinion magazines of the right and left. They have to offer enough news and commentary of interest to their constituency to sell magazines, and apparently Newsweek couldn’t interest enough left-wingers to stay afloat.
And if I was building cars, I think that I’d like to build the kind of cars that car builders like to build. It’s got nothing to do with driving, of course.
I had just demonstrated to my wife that the TIME and NEWSWEEK “magazines” were now what I could get in Spanish in Chile in 1991 in terms of number of pages.
Frankly, if they go back to mimeograph, they could save some money. But for total convenience of the “journalist-authors”, print it on toilet paper. That way they can at least salve their consciences that they are recycling the paper and not just old, dated, disproven Marxist-Leninist residua that the world outgrew even if they did not.
I live and work in the Washington D.C. area and have been here since 2001. I haven’t picked up a Washington Post since 1996 when I was living here before. We subscribe for the Sunday WP so that my wife can get the advertisements on Fridays. One of my weekly pleasures is to un over the Sunday WP in my driveway on the way to Church and to throw it away still in the plastic when I get home. I am about as well informed as anyone in my office on current events, without having to contribute to 4th Estate.