Sadly, I think that weekly newsmagazines are dead, and deservedly so. Your entry here reminded me that I haven’t bought an issue of Time or Newsweek in years, and never even thumb through an issue at my local news stand. And this is even though I regularly subscribed to both magazines from my high school years through several years after college.

There are still a few magazines that I read regularly, though they tend to be special focus (e.g., Skeptic, The Economist, New Scientist, and The New Yorker).

Oddly enough, I don’t even care much for online weekly magazines. The news cycle moves too fast. I think that monthly magazines can often offer information and judicious commentary, but newsweeklies exist in an uncomfortable twilight zone where they are forever trying to play catch-up with events, but inevitably losing to TV and more nimble daily papers.

More photos? Shorter articles? More facts-rebuttal? This sounds like making Time the equivalent of People Magazine with snarkier letters to the editor. And note that Life Magazine died because its photo-heavy, short article format simply looked old, tired and irrelevant compared to the immediacy of TV and the slickness of People, US and entertainment shows like Entertainment Tonight.

The Week already has the news summary business covered, as does US News and World Report (although I read the former but never the latter), so I don’t think that Time can really compete here anymore.

As an aside, even though some like it, the newly revamped TV Guide is facing a dilemma much like the challenges facing Time. It has become bigger, slicker, and yet offers fewer listings and reviews than before because people can more easily get TV show timelines and other information from other sources, including their cable providers or online. It’s no longer really a guide to TV, but a general entertainment weekly (like Entertainment Weekly or Premiere or Us, etc) with a half-assed primetime TV grid thrown in.

I think that the future belongs to whatever online newspapers can exploit traditional and new resources better. Online news may even eclipse TV. TV news is inherently shallow, and seems unable to shake its dependence on attractive anchors without journalistic experience and its addiction to sweeps-driven irrelevant but salacious drivel. On the other hand, the best online newspapers (BBC, The Times of London, and The New York Times) not only provide current information, but also often intelligently exploit their archives.

By the way, note that I am not defending the ideological narrowness of these newspapers or the New York Times fiasco with its stupid TimesSelect service, which restricts access to its columnists. But when a significant person like Jane Jacobs died, the Times not only published a lengthy obituary, but also made available online many past articles that had been written about her and provided links to non-Times web pages, so that an interested reader could get a sense of how she had been viewed over the course of her life and career. Similarly, a profile of a new book on Virginia Woolf was accompanied by links to every review of her novel, along with most biographies and major retrospectives that had appeared in the Times.

The BBC news site excels in providing links to past articles and background material. These sites are also getting smarter about including audio, video and graphics links, going far beyond photography.

Where they need to get smarter is in embracing a 24 hour news cycle. Some online newspapers still base the placing of news stories on the publication date of the physical newspaper. Worse, some newspapers like the LA Times will publish an arts review, especially music or theater reviews of short run productions, after the performance run has concluded, providing an “official record” of the performance, but useless to anyone who might have been interested in seeing the performance on the basis of the review.

So, for my money, every review of a concert or play should be available online hours after the first performance has concluded. Every movie review of a film opening on Friday should appear Thursday evening at the latest (with similar adjustments for movies opening on other days), and should include a space for reader comment. Smart promoters would also provide a cleaned-up audio or video clip from a performance or rehearsal that could be included within a review.

And (other shoe dropping), Apple or some other company should deliver some iPod equivalent portable device that can capture and store the content of online newspapers. Something you can read at the lunch counter. Or while on the toilet (sorry, but essential).

But obviously, if I want to be able to read about a concert review hours after the opening night performance, there is no way in hell that I would be willing to wait for the Time Magazine review a week and a half after the fact.

But perhaps this is part of the key to the future of Time Magazine. Ted Turner realized that the movie libraries that he had acquired had a potential greater value than the recently released movies regularly shown on broadcast TV, to which the networks had no long-term rights. Today, TV networks have seen the light with respect to the release of their old shows on DVD.

As a further aside, I note that The New Yorker is offering a DVD collection of every issue of the magazine published between February 1925 and February 2005 for $49 (down from an initial price of $100), one of the boldest and most interesting offers I have ever seen.

Similarly, it may be that the future of newspapers and magazines might lie not just in covering current events, but in intelligently exploiting archival and related information which they either own or have access to. This also allows them to better distinguish themselves from some blog sites, which can offer tons of opinion and commentary, but not as much archival or historical information (I note some of the content-embedded stuff here on 2blowhards as often worthy exceptions to the rule).

Another thing: Sometimes I find myself reading an intelligent letter to the editor on some story or opinion that I missed the first time around. I give props to those online newspapers which provide an intelligent hot link to the original story and related articles. This is obviously something you can’t easily get from the physical newspaper, even if you have back issues stashed in your den or garage. But again, the key here is not just covering news and events, but in providing useful ways of organizing and presenting information, chronologically and thematically.

Posted by: Alec on May 23, 2006 2:29 PM

If you go back and look at old issues of "Time"---there were more black and white pics, and smaller, more serious-looking print. Fewer graphics and pizazz. They also had much more brainy, cryptic headings under the photos---stuff like "Communism as swiss cheese"---something that you had to read the article to get. It made the whole magazine seem more serious, more like "news." I like it better. Now I can't tell the difference between "People" and "Time"---and I don't read either one.

Posted by: annette on May 24, 2006 10:49 AM

Scary days for the employees of news magazines! It's hard not to sympathize with editors given the job of keeping the franchises alive. How? The news itself is old news by the time a week has passed. Provocative opinions can be found all over the place these days. So: great angles? Snazzy production numbers? Just holding on for dear life? Like some of you guys I think the BBC is doing a heck of a job of being a substantial-old-media outfit that's making itself useful and appealing in a new-media universe.

Annette -- That's a smart catch. Someone in the media biz once told me that the newsmagazines used to run 30-50% more words than they currently do. I guess it's a much more image (and impact-) driven medium than it once was.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on May 24, 2006 11:54 AM

Beef up the feature articles. Try to make the magazine something that people are glad to have read, rather than something they want to take off the newsstand.

If I were the publisher for Time, I'd be very worried that my articles don't ever seem to get linked by bloggers. In other words, it's a general interest magazine that doesn't seem to interest anybody.

Posted by: Zach on May 29, 2006 10:52 PM






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