Bitter pills and magazine journalism

Maybe it's not the most popular thing to say. Heck, I'll say it anyway.
I actually like The Economist.
I emerge bleary from its Brit grayness -- or is it greyness?  -- as though from a Treasury, State Department, White House, Downing Street briefing.
Not every college course entertained me. That doesn't mean I didn't learn.
Oh, it's a slog between witticisms that are British journalism.
But The Economist falls into a class of media with PBS's The News Hour, world's most boring broadcast.
Yeah, I'm hopeless. I watch Jim Lehrer and his gang for the same reason I read The Economist. After the superficial news treatment on the commercial networks, I need some depth to balance the froth.
I don't need any more of the News Hour-Economist's sugarless medicine, however.
So when Newsweek went to a quasi-Economist makeover, I missed the fun, the elan, the immediacy of the old book I had read and enjoyed since before Ben Bradlee left it to run The Washington Post.
The magazine reformulation didn't work for me nor apparently for a lot of others.
And more bad luck: The recent remake of Newsweek hit newsstands along with the economic downturn.
I hate that.
Yet I love a national newspaper that comes out once a week -- one description of Newsweek's former personality.
It's a tough formula. Years ago a weekly, newsprint, full-size National Observer went broke trying the prescription.
See here, though: Features editors at lots of daily newspapers reverse the method successfully all the time -- publishing a magazine-style section on a daily basis.
What I'm describing is originality, a good fit with the audience and balance between news as info and news as fun.
Media sort themselves out according to the right set of ingredients all the time.
The apothecaries at Newsweek simply didn't get the mix right. I think it was too imitative of The Economist. One of those is enough.
So now Newsweek's bitter pill to swallow is named Doomsday. The magazine will be sold or closed.
No publication wants a dose of imitating that.


  

Our convention-al media

PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK the editor how many work in the newsroom.
Oh, about half, goes the old joke.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s Justin Peters wrote a cute send-up on the 15,000 reporters at the Democratic National Convention.
Most are wearing bad suits.
A thousand are drunk, which Peters says is as it should be.
Many don’t have credentials, can’t find the credentialing office, are complaining about lack of floor passes and are smugly criticizing others in the media who have no business crowding the place up.
Those are right.
But an exception not mentioned in CJR is Asa Eslocker with his ABC-TV camera crew. Denver police arrested Asa – roughly, it sounded like – and used language not too delicate for the reporter’s ears but not likely to be heard from the DNC podium.
Cops said the network crew was blocking a hotel’s private sidewalk.
ABC said the journalists were looking into corporate lobbyists and wealthy fat cats at the convention.
Oh, what a lovely reason to get busted. Waytago, Asa.

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MANY OF THE convention-going journalists are doing it for funsies, no doubt.
Bloggers had an extraordinary welcome.
But professional news organizations can spend $50,000 a reporter and up covering presidential campaigns. Convention town hotels and bars and restaurants and whatever else can be hidden on expense vouchers eat up a bunch.
So why do it, asks U.S. News & World Report.
Its Whispers column quotes Mark Potts, a media blogger at RecoveringJournalist.com, suggesting the media instead do community journalism – my phrase, not his.
Let Associated Press and the big syndicated news operations blow their dough, says Potts. And spend the money instead on covering city hall or local schools and the like.
Well, I’d spend the money on the presidential campaigns. But I suggest the “community” approach, because that implies relationship journalism.
Make the candidates’ health care platforms a local story. Explain what the two hot wars are doing to the home front. Tell the local economy story in Obama and McCain terms the hometown crowd can feel.
All we need to know about the conventions – except for the odd story an Asa Eslocker might get arrested for – can be seen on the television tube as it happens.
Relating politics to the local media audience — priceless, as the commercial says.

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MARK SALTER wrote books with his and boss’s John McCain’s name on them.
Now he’s writing the senator’s acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination.
His muse is Peggy Noonan, the hit speechwriter of the George H. W. Bush presidential years, according to Newsweek.
The McCain candidacy is derivative. It’s based on the ongoing war in Iraq, the tax policies of the current president Bush and the trickle down economy from as far back as Ronald Reagan’s days but as dried up for Americans as Death Valley
Two of Salter’s books with McCain – Hard Call and Faith of My Fathers – are workmanlike, readable prose. But they are not dream-inspired like the two published works of Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic opponent.
The Republican writing team will need more than the Noonan mojo and the campaign leftovers of past Republican years.

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THIS IS A credentialing society.
We don’t seek education for its own sake. We earn degrees and diplomas to get our ticket punched for entering the middle class mainstream.
The odd result is bored, tired, ennui toward life instead of the genuine liberal arts and sciences joy of discovery about the universe and all that’s in it.
It’s the same with journalists who seek the political convention credential and then sit on it.
They have a nasty habit of reporting in the “here we go again” fashion slouch.
But the unfolding DNC show in Denver – and with any luck the RNC convention to follow – don’t live down to the conventional view of blah-boring.
The aroma of American renewal is in the air.
And any journalist who can’t smell those roses had just as well join the drunks spotted by the CJR observer at the convention.