May 21, 2009

NewsYuck: A Desperate Weekly Gets Overweighty

One of life’s guilty pleasures has been to unwind by sneaking a late-night peek through Time and Newsweek while stuffing junk food. I never knew what was junkier – the liberal-conventional-wisdom-regurgitating, pop-culture-reflecting, provocative-photo-illustrated, “news-lite” format of the rags, or the handfuls of sugar cereal I was double-fistedly cramming into my trap directly out of the box.

Now I do.

Look, dudes, life is clearly tough these days for folks making their livings in the Profession Formerly Known as Journalism. The news cycle is about 80 seconds long, and more armchair quarterbacks populate the Internet at any given eye-blink than on all of Super Bowl Sunday.

Even with the generous 5 p.m. day-before deadline for this bi-weekly discourse, by the time I get to any bit of interesting news, it’s has been chewed over, swallowed, spat up and chewed again like a camel’s cud – or maybe all that sugar cereal at 2 a.m. – on various blogs and online punditry aggregations.

So it must be really hard for a Serious Journalist to get differentiation – not to mention circulation – without stooping to Sybil the Soothsayer, Miss Mata Hari and Her Skeletons in the Closet and Vox Populi.

Maybe that’s why Newsweek’s editor Jon Meacham seems like he’s Mad as Hell and Not Going to Take It Anymore. How else to explain his relaunched mag, its name ever-so-cleverly displayed on its stripped-down title page as New_week, with a big black space where the “s” used to be. Oh, now I get it!

In case you didn’t, Meacham painfully spells it all out in a plodding, pleading lead essay titled “A New Magazine for a Changing World.” (Someone was awake all night thinking up that one.)

“We know you know what the news is,” Meacham moans. “We are not pretending to be your guide through the chaos of the Information Age. If you are like us” . . . (annoyingly self-important but still desperate to hang on to your jobs?) . . . “you do not need, or want, a single such Sherpa. What we can offer you is the benefit of careful work discovering new facts and prompting unexpected thought.”

Gag.

Meacham is letting on that he and his publishers realize they can no longer compete with the warp speed and scale-driven thoroughness of the Internet. So they are force-feeding us “the reported narrative – a piece, grounded in original observation and freshly discovered fact, that illuminates the important and the interesting.” And “the argued essay – a piece, grounded in reason and supported by evidence, that makes the case for something.”

In other words, so that we think it’s worth shelling out the $5.95 price they are now slapping on the cover, they’re going all Weighty on us. Or IMHO (as they say in Meacham’s least-favorite medium), Overweighty.

Gone are the highly skimmable if not especially insightful news articles, interspersed with opinion, various quick hits and the fun if extraordinarily predictable Conventional Wisdom (Bush always gets a “down” arrow, Obama an “up.” Yet in the new, graphically gussied-up but textually bogged-down version, Sleek Barry’s projectile is actually inverted. Now there’s something “New!”)

All the opinion articles are woefully stacked like lumbering 747s on a runway in a section called “The Take” (another sleepless night in the Naming Department) differentiated only by a small headshot and an ostensibly apropos photo illustration stretched across the top like those pointless wallpaper strips in badly decorated rooms. Followed by “Features,” ever-so-subtly subtitled “The First Rough Draft of History” (pink slips all around in Naming), a combination of overwrought interviews and badly disguised opinion articles.

With everything rendered in a tiny, lifeless font that makes editorial indistinguishable from the ads, and clumped in a heftier whole that is decidedly not digestible in a single nocturnal gulp, if digestible at all.

So much for my late-night junk news fix. The Devil Internet made Meacham do it.

Now I suppose he wants me to start snarfing oatmeal.