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.


  

The streetcar that carried the general away

We journalists are Blanche DuBois, forever depending on the kindness of strangers.

People figure no public official will ever follow Gen. Stanley McChrystal's model of allowing a reporter into his candid inner circle. The general ended up fired for his barracks room candor.

Yet I believe journalistic history will repeat itself. Often. Like Blanche's signature line from A Streetcar Named Desire.

Kindness is another way of expressing openness or even naivete.

We haven't seen the end of opening up, even or especially by star-encrusted bravado.

And the public will be the better for it -- as always.

The career mistake of Gen. McChrystal turned into his ultimate service to the nation: Government and public both refocused on the war in Afghanistan, which we are losing or at least not winning.

Miss DuBois will return. We share her perpetual dependency on strangers.

The literary metaphor of Tennessee Williams's character in his 1947 play strikes my mind like a controlled nuclear event.

Blanche's nemesis was another Stanley -- the brutish Kowalski, antithesis of her dowdy, loopy world view and romanticism that drew out the beast in Stanley.

Excuse me, Gen. McChrystal, have you read the play?

The Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings, who did the live-in interview with McChrystal, might not remind anyone of a DuBois or of the southern playwright who wrote Streetcar.

Yet the reporter and the general acted out the archetypes of clash between brutishness and soft persistence that spin off beneficial journalism like a newly discovered molecule from an atom smasher named Desire.

Oh, yes. Journalism will replicate the explosion, because that's what journalism does.

Bed sheets, bazookas: New Yorker, the hen

Eustace Tilley blew this one.
If you know that name, you probably “got” the Barack-o-drama cover of The New Yorker.
Satire is a double meaning the reader is in on. Or else it’s a scam.
If the shock of the image allows a viewer to take it seriously, the artistic or literary trick becomes a mere antic, a ruse, a hustle.
The questioned cover shows Mr. and Mrs. Obama as flag burning terrorists in the Oval Office. “Politics of fear,” is the satiric target by cartoonist Barry Blitt.
Trouble is, polls show some Americans believe – wrongly, but believe anyway – the lies connecting Islam, Osama bin Laden and the possible First Couple.
Those of us who don’t believe are nervous that we live in a society where some do harbor or even foster those untruths. So we’re not too keen for the cover either.
We prefer an information campaign.
The New Yorker tried the humor of disinformation and laid an egg.
Hey, Eustace is a buddy of mine, fictional though he is. I delight in seeing the signature dandy on the front of the magazine. He’s the logo. He’s the sophistication. He’s a pretty good clothes horse, often depicted by TNY satirically with props.
Editor David Remnick can sly up the magazine’s symbol, can satirize public figures, can make fun of our social foibles.
Surely he can do a take-off on the Democrat with a funny name and a funny past and a serious chance of becoming president.
Well, yes. If he can answer one question: Does the cover communicate?
Not to Eustace’s standard is the answer.
Remnick knows how hard irony is to wield as a means of conversation. And he must know he goofed. Because he’s trying to explain the joke. That’s proof positive the joke fell as flat as a magazine cover.
It’s as lame as New York Times editor Bill Keller trying to explain the paper meant to say Republican presidential candidate John McCain showed poor judgment about ethics, not that he had an affair necessarily.
Manhattan is an island. Those editors need to swim to shore more often.
For The Times to link sex and a politician was to run a public DNA test on his bed sheets.
For The New Yorker to attack ignorance with sophistication was to bring a pen knife to a bazooka fight.

Revive us again! Clay Felker and a hallelujah for the magazine business!

Magazines are slick, sometimes sophisticated plays for reader attention, subscriber loyalty. And I love them.
Their circ departments must know I’m a mark. They’re always sending me their “professional rate” discount offers. So I take more than I need as a sampler.
Those markdowns suggest churn to me. Subscribers get super savings so publishers can try to stay even with their declining customer lists.
Maybe its time for another magazine revival. There is a certain sameness about all that pass in front of me.
Clay Felker built the model 40 years ago as New York. The glossy challenged even The New Yorker, the one legendary journalist Harrison Salisbury famously called “perhaps the best magazine ever.”
Everywhere you looked editors imitated New York’s graphic design by Milton Glaser, the narrative writing style by the likes of Tom Wolfe or Jimmy Breslin and the sassy service information.
When I became a newspaper features editor, our tribe was still trying to borrow as much of the tone as we could get away with.
Felker came out of The New York Herald Tribune tradition. It was said The Trib’s editors went out for sex at lunchtime, while The New York Times editors merely went for a drink.
Sexiness was and is a main ingredient to compete with other media, especially when TV does more show and tell than even movies once thought they could get away with.
New York’s groundbreaking editor invented a formula without being formulaic.
“American Journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker,” said the magazine’s current editor, Adam Moss. The Times quotes his statement in an appropriately generous obit. Felker died at age 82 in his Manhattan home. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/business/media/02felker.html?ex=1372737600&en=20a30abd0cea6d55&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
He was middle-aged and I was starting out when he taught me editors could be full of themselves. And how!
Felker and his friends Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, and Tom Winship, editor of The Boston Globe, spoke like a trio of mythological Graces, or maybe it was Titans, to our graduate journalism class at Columbia University.
Honestly, those egos sucked the oxygen right out of the classroom.
Humility has its place in editing. But so does chutzpah, the creative life of Clay Felker shows.
In the reinvention of modern media on all print and broadcast and digital platforms, journalism will need a revivalist of his style.