Newsweek gets a makeover.
Meacham–a very smart and thoughtful guy, which in my experience is not necessarily true of all newsmagazine editors (all two, that is)–actually says that his model is “the great monthlies of old” like Harper’s and Esquire. He says the building blocks of the new Newsweek will be “two kinds of stories”: the “reported narrative” and “the argued essay.” So what’s wrong with that? Well, to start, those grand old monthlies at their primes had a smaller paying readership than Newsweek has at its supposed nadir. So duplicating their greatness could be a pyrrhic victory. Furthermore, while it’s not impossible to get readers by peddling sheer enjoyment, it’s a lot easier to peddle necessity, or at least usefulness: You need this magazine to sort out the world for you and to make sure you haven’t missed anything. In short, you need it to be your guide through the chaos, as Meacham so eloquently describes what he intends to avoid. And when something like the Internet comes along to make the chaos even more chaotic, you need your trusty guide more, not less. Possibly the dumbest slogan ever for a newsmag was one used briefly by Time a few years ago: “Make time for Time.” Make time for Time? Who has that kind of time? If you can convince people that reading Time will save them time, then you may have a deal.
I wish Meacham Godspeed, but there’s almost no hope for him or Newsweek, and here’s why. If there were a market for an opinion journal that could sell in excess of a million copies, it would have revealed itself before this. The advantage journals of opinion possess is that their readers are extremely loyal and they have a personal stake in them that no newsmagazine has ever generated. The disadvantage they have is that the audience for journals of opinion is small.
More important, they are published for people who are passionate about abstract ideas, and find it invigorating, thrilling, and exciting to see them batted about. This is not the profile of the general mass reader.
Noamie Emery in The Weekly Standard:
But for something new and different, it certainly seems to be old and familiar, in fact almost exactly what it’s been for at least the last year. There’s the big, dreamy photo of Barack Obama, (check); the view of the world, as seen by Obama (check); the series of stories (by liberal writers) about how dreamy Obama can be. There is nary a cross word (check) about His Sublimity. The big difference is that, on this cover, the name “Obama” is printed out twice.
UPDATE: Mickey Kaus in Slate on Kingsley
I tend to think the problem with Newsweek‘s redesign is less the basic choice (to put out a non-newsweekly) than ”what Mikhail Gorbachev used to call ‘the approaches of the stagnation period,’” as Kinsley puts it. I expect Newsweek will get much better in future iterations, and that Kinsley’s ridicule will have a big impact (goodbye, “Letters” page). That doesn’t mean I expect the project to succeed. Just because newsweeklies face a choice of two approaches doesn’t mean one of them is right. …
UPDATE #2: Mark Hemingway at The Corner, linking to Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard.
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