Bring out your dead!
Posted on 12/29/2009 7:19:47 AM PST by abb
Less than a year ago, during yet another public discussion about the future of traditional media, I said that it seemed extremely unlikely that, for instance, Newsweek would last another five years, provoking guffaws among blogger types and stout denials from the magazine (i.e. a minor kerfuffle).
Newsweek and its parent, the Washington Post Co., announced yesterday a significant cut in its rate base, a further round of buyouts and layoffs, and a plan to make an already anorexic magazine even thinner. The Washington Post Co., for good measure, added its own bad news and bleak outlook.
My prediction about Newsweek seems to have been significantly optimistic (when I made it, I confess to thinking it was irresponsibly exaggerated). I would revise it now to two years: Sometime around the fourth quarter of next year, Newsweek will be shuttered (possibly there’s a phase where it goes bi-weekly, or even monthly).
The people at Newsweek and at the Washington Post Co. will be as adamant and dismissive about denying this as they were about my original assertion. And yet, they obviously can’t be certain they have a positive future (or any future).
All they can honestly say is that they are trying to find a way to go forward that will keep them in business, but they haven’t found it yet. Now, I am not sure that would be a good idea to say—it might further cause advertisers and readers to desert the magazine, and further demoralize the staff.
On the other hand, it might be this gap between putting on a good face and the stark reality of the present mess that is making people so much more desperate and crazy. Not that long ago, the covers of Newsweek and Time were among the most important individual pieces of media in the nation. Now they are irrelevant and unmentioned.
This decline and approaching death does not merely have to do with the present circumstance. The present circumstance (we have yet to coin a useful and evocative name for this terrible present circumstance) is really just the deus ex machina.
The weak and lingering will no longer be able to resist. But how do you confront this? How do you say to your colleagues and your customers, while we’re still here today, in all honesty we’re toast tomorrow?
Saying anything other than that is so obviously corporate baloney, as well as the natural human inability to face the abyss.
Geez, those extra-large images of Bozo and the First Water Buffalo nearly induced a spontaneous retch.
Bring out your dead!
Exactly! It isn't dead until it is. While gasping their so-called last gasps they continue to seriously hurting our nation.
Please, someone call me when they are finally dead and buried and having the funeral luncheon.
Exactly! It isn't dead until it is. While gasping their so-called last gasps they continue seriously hurting our nation.
Please, someone call me when they are finally dead and buried and having the funeral luncheon.
My doctor told me he has never bought a magazine subscription.
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Same with me. I never bought a magazine subscription for the office.
I am retired now. Some years ago I just started throwing them away or giving them to the staff. The ads of nearly naked ( or even fully naked rear views) of the models were simply too close to porn for my comfort.
Stimulus money, saving jobs... the only way out.
Guys in comas do not publish daily.
True.
But companies in a coma(financial meltdown, chapter 11 etc) continue to operate due to financial trickery.
Question is, for how long can they avoid the inevitable?
The New York Times is not even close to being as influential today, as they were say 20 years ago.
As at right now, I'd say Glenn Beck is vastly more influential, and reaches far more people on his radio and TV programs and his constantly best selling books than the New York Times does. Same with Rush.
The days when "it wasn't news till the New York Times says it is news" are long gone. The New York Times totally ignored the Van Jones and the ACORN stories. Glenn Beck run with those stories, and Glenn Beck won.
The New York Times is not even close to being as influential today, as they were say 20 years ago.
As at right now, I'd say Glenn Beck is vastly more influential, and reaches far more people on his radio and TV programs and his constantly best selling books than the New York Times does. Same with Rush.
The days when "it wasn't news till the New York Times says it is news" are long gone. The New York Times totally ignored the Van Jones and the ACORN stories. Glenn Beck run with those stories, and Glenn Beck won.
Wasn't anybody at Newsweak, that's for sure!
For propaganda to be valuable, someone has to read it.
http://steveouting.com/
Farewell, E&P: The last of my 14-1/2 years of columns
Thanks. My lunch appetite has been ruined.
However, your pictorial display of NewsWeak’s love affair with Obozo is another excellent reason to say goodbye to the liberal excrement known as NewsWeak.
I stopped subscribing to NewsWeak and Slime shortly after Ronald Reagan became our president inspite of these two left wing waste of trees posing as news mags.
I don’t subscribe to or buy Newsweek.
Recently I came across a copy of it in an office and browsed through it. I was very surprised to see the ads in the back of it: many of them were for “get rich quick” schemes and seemed to be aimed at a very undereducated readership.
This made quite an impression on me, but perhaps it was because I had not read this magazine for a while. I don’t recall that it always carried ads like that. Certainly they weren’t the same sort of ads you’d find in The New Yorker or The Atlantic or a similar magazine.
If Newsweek goes belly up, does Gibbs lose his job too?
The drug companies wouldn’t waste their money on Newsweak subscription.
For close to two decades Newsweak and Slime and out here on the West Coast, the Gay Frisco Chronicle have sent free copies to Drs/Dentist and other health care providers with offices.
Most places, where we get our hair cut and whatever, haven’t
subscribed to NewsWeak/Slime for probably a decade. Yet, they still get the weakly posers.
Yet it is a safe bet that somehow these free mags are counted as subscriptions.
One of our neighbors had 3 kids in the local community college. . The college had a requirement for the kids to subscribe to basically free, NY Slimes, Gay Frisco Chronicle, NewsWeak/ Slime.
Their youngest child finished a decade ago. Yet their parents, our neighbors still get the NY Slimes, Gay Frisco Chronicle, NewsWeak/ Slime delivered for free. They get billed, and they never pay. They have tried to stop the free delivery and still get the trash. So their blue recycle container gets these unwanted pieces of trash every day and week.
Their last issue will have massively signed page blaming Bush and Cheney for their demise.
“If Newsweek goes belly up, does Gibbs lose his job too?”
Naah, he will just cut out the middle men re his propaganda posing as news.
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