Why Newsweek Deserved Its Demise
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Why Its Awful Playing for North Korea
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Newsweek - an American weekly published over seven decades - is being sold by its parent company The Washington Post. The news magazine has lost tens of millions over the past two years and the Post does not see the publication becoming profitable again. If a buyer cannot be found, Newsweek will cease publication.
Cry no tries for this lousy weekly. A many self-righteous journalists are mourning the decline of this industry and they seem to want to blame everybody: Google News, the Internet, bloggers, cable news, Craiglist and other ad websites which have taken away much of the classified ad business, ect... Everybody that it except themselves. They way they see it their product suffers no deficiencies. Their magazines are simply prefect bastions of enlightenment and if people cannot see it it is because the average America is a dump NASCAR fan.
The reality is that so many magazines and newspapers are folding because so many of them do not offer a product worth subscribing to. Many of them are incredibly poor in their reporting duties that many simply no longer care to read them. Back then many people had to put up with a city newspaper just so they can read the things they wanted will shunning all the other crap, but now they no longer have to do that. They can just turn to another medium in a world of plenty. Not all newspapers and magazines are dying. Those worthy are thriving such as The Economist and the Wall Street Journal.
Newsweek, alas for them, is not worthy. This is a silly and cheap publication that devotes so much space to non-sense instead of to substantive news. I do not have time to write a litany of why Newsweek deserves its demise, but here are three reasons:
1)
Newsweek is about to begin a major change in its identity, with a new design, a much smaller and, it hopes, more affluent readership, and some shifts in content. [...]
“The Bluffer’s Guide,” will tell readers how to sound as if they are knowledgeable on a current topic, whether they are or not.
So, let's get this straight: Newsweek wants to be more sophisticated and its manner of doing so is giving its readers a guide on how to sound smart rather than doing quality reporting which could actually make them informed. Need I say more?
2)
This counts as part of the remodeling of Newsweek into an ostensibly high-class publication by revamping the book review into a guide which encourages less reading by readers and encourages them instead to go by the shallow review rather than read and think for themselves.
And, finally, 3)
Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works. [...]
Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
This was a Newsweek piece published in 1995 which proclaimed that the Internet is just a silly fad which would never replace...a magazine.
Newsweek has literally eaten its own arrogant and dismissive and short-sighted and lousy reporting. And good riddance!
