weeklies are weak

Somehow I missed this a couple of months ago, but it’s still worth noting (in light of Roger L. Simon’s comment the other day).

You know things are really bad in MediaLand when Newsweek editor Jon Meacham has to try to convince j-school students that his magazine is better than The Economist, which they seem to prefer [e.a.]:

“And how to communicate that we have things to say that are both factually new and analytically new and to get you under the tent is a fact that scares me—not The Economist per se. It’s an incredible frustration that I’ve got some of the most decent, hard-working, honest, passionate, straight-shooting, non-ideological people who just want to tell the damn truth, and how to get this past this image that we’re just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get, or something, that’s the challenge. And I just don’t know how to do it, so if you’ve got any ideas, tell me.”

I haven’t picked up Newsweek in at least twenty years. I pick up The Economist occasionally, but I never have time to read it. If I did have (or take) the time to read a newsweekly, though, I would definitely choose The Economist, which covers everything in-depth, at leisure, in a thoughtful way, with background, and free of cant; and whose editorial staff indicates that it has an interest in understanding the whole world—often from the perspective of those living abroad, not from a distinctly American point of view.

I think American journalism’s biggest weakness is its obsessive solipsism. For a media elite that prides itself on its sophistication, the columnists and commentators whose opinions seem to matter (in both the MSM and the blogosphere) are maddeningly—and even frighteningly, considering the bad intentions of some of the bad actors out there—provincial and America-centric.

That’s my cosmopolitanism showing, though, and I don’t consider myself a laboratory. I certainly don’t represent any typical bloc of voters. Still, some of the comments at the New York Observer site reflect my point of view. Like this one:

Dear Jon Meacham, you just don’t get it. I (a well-educated consumer of print journalism) do not exactly look down on Newsweek. I’m a big fan of yours, too. Nobody doubts that it has good journalism, even though it is is a somewhat dumbed-down, glossly format. But the Economist offers something beyond coverage of the same three, U.S.-focused issues. The Economist is far from perfect; it has a lot of problems. But, the fact is, there is a whole lot more going on in the world than the U.S. presidential election, Iraq, and Afghanistan, important as these issues may be. A lot more. The Economist regularly reports on issues in every region. The U.S. news media, a decade or so ago, got hooked on the “big story.” That’s a great scale economy, but is really does not do the trick. So, you know, if you want to become more global in your coverage and aim straight for the cosmopolitan set, without dumbing it down, then you will get new readers. But, I suspect you will lose a lot, too. You’d have to lay out more money for less subscribers. I doubt you will do that…

Yep. I think the narrow focus and simplistic storylines don’t appeal to those (the educated) who are willing to take out the time to read a newsweekly. It’s also likely that the concept of a newsweekly  is hopelessly outdated. News comes in rivers! It’s everywhere! Who cares what happened last week, fer crissakes? If we’re interested in the “news,” we wanna know what’s happening now.

But another reader at the Observer offers a different kind of critique, specific to Newsweek’s reporting—its compact with its readers—, and backs it up with evidence [I have taken the liberty of adding a link to the AJR piece he quotes, which I've been meaning to write about for a very long time but never got around to; it is the clearest indication by far that newsrooms now consider themselves to be primarily in the storytelling (rather than fact-reporting) business [e.a.]:

Baby Boomer Professor (not verified) says:

Dear Mr. Meacham,

You can’t figure out why we have deserted Newsweek because the political correctness you stand for made it unwise for us to tell you the truth. I subscribed to Newsweek for years. I remember George Will’s column pooh-poohing the China Syndrome the week Three Mile Island happened. I waited gleefully for Will’s next column, which came out headlined, “As I was Saying…” Once leaving Newsweek was as unthinkable as leaving the Democratic Party. But then came your beloved Clintons, and you changed.

Here’s your public face, the obnoxious Evan Thomas, trying to put the best spin on heading the Duke lynch mob:

[On Newsweek's coverage of the Duke rape case]: “The narrative was properly about race, sex and class…. We went a beat too fast in assuming that a rape took place…. We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.”
– American Journalism Review, August/September 2007 issue.[1]

Consider the mind-blowing implications of that “defense” of Newsweek’s abominable reporting—they got the story right; it was only the facts (which is to say: everything) they got wrong. Huh? You can see why some former devotees of American journalism are shaking their heads and wondering what’s happened to the news business (beyond the obvious disappearance of news reporting from TV).