Me, I put up with liberal journalism because I choose to. The
point is, these days I don’t have to. Neither does anyone else.
That’s my predicate for examining the Washington Post’s
recent handoff of Newsweek to multimillionaire audio
entrepreneur Sidney Harman, whose job it becomes to invent a niche
for a publication fewer and fewer seem to desire, else the
Post wouldn’t have dumped it, right?
The Newsweek sale this summer — for a solitary dollar,
plus assumption of $70 million in debts — affords a chance to look
at how the free marketplace appraises journalistic value; which,
needless to say, isn’t how such appraisals were conducted a couple
of decades ago.
Copious were the sentimental tears, and highly pronounced the
sniffles, which accompanied the obsequies for what the old
Newsweek supposedly had represented — well-reasoned, as
well as reasonable, interpretation of our orbiting planet. The
press, being the press, recalled with affection the magazine’s
supposedly storied past, amid reflection on — once more from the
top, all right? — the future of print journalism. Which future
looks less and less secure, as more and more journalistic oaks bend
to the harsh technological winds that howl.
What now for Newsweek? What now for that which the
contemptuous call the dead-tree industry? As for the first,
Nonagenarian Harman (as Time magazine, in the Luce era, would have
denominated him) told the Wall Street Journal, weeks after
the sale, “You pick up the magazine and it ought to be shouting at
you, ‘Hey, man, you’re in for the time of your life.’” There was
other stuff about higher-quality paper, better graphics, and
subscriber perks. It was instinct, nonetheless, to give readers the
time of their lives that sets Harman’s meditations above the merely
formulaic.
Catering to readers is exactly, I would say, what
Newsweek ought to try. I’d be surprised, frankly, if a
shop run according to the playbooks of the past 30 years could
figure out what that meant, “cater to readers.” Even at that, the
question would arise: hasn’t the marketplace pronounced already on
the superfluity and growing irrelevance of the newsmagazine format?
We should hand it to Harman, even so: he’s onto something too few
fellow owners seem to apprehend — to wit, think about your
readers, otherwise you’re gone. Get close to them. Figure out what
they want: better yet, grasp whatever it is by intuition and life
experience. Then, for Horace Greeley’s sake, give it to ‘em!
They’ll bite, and they’ll buy, as always happens in successful
instances of what high-minded liberalism understands, m’dear, as
Raw Commerce.
The rawer the better, I would think: these days especially, as
the Internet sucks away thousands — who knows, maybe tens of
thousands a day — from the pacific pursuit of putting up one’s
feet on the ottoman and leafing through pages of print.
The old journalism profession knew better. It knew better
because it liked people in a way the current institution can’t
begin to approximate. The old profession knew itself to be
commercial and was fine with that. The new profession — the
adversary media was the term we started hearing in the
'70s — became starchy and not a little proud, just a bit
overbearing; insisting, more and more every year, on the primacy of
a do-good worldview of Uplift, Diversity, and Societal Advancement
that coincided more often than not with the worldview of the
liberal establishment. Of which establishment the media slowly
became part.
Once the media began hectoring readers rather than entertaining
and helping them — showing them the time of their lives, in
Harmanese — readers began seeking alternative deployments of time
and energies. What you don’t have to do, in this land of the free
and technologically enabled, you tend to find yourself not
doing.
AS I SAID AT the beginning, I read the liberal press because I
need and want to (believe it or not). If that need, that desire,
warred with every instinct of self-preservation, I wouldn’t put up
with it, far less pay for the privilege of respectfully retrieving
the New York Times from my front sidewalk each
morning.
The fun went out of newspapers and magazines a couple of decades
ago. A generation of journalists committed to the high seriousness
took over from a generation wedded often as not to the low
non-seriousness: stories about plain old people, not all of them by
any means Harvard or Yale graduates. People who might like Willie
Nelson or Sinatra; who drank beer, saluted the flag at football
games, tried to keep marriages together instead of assenting to
breakup at the first sign of difficulty or yearning; who helped the
kids with homework, carried loans on their Chevrolets, maintained
experiential or sentimental connections to the military. In those
days, be it added, the people had values and norms that many in the
news business shared, having themselves come from the people’s
middle ranks, feeling with the people some of the same promptings
of interest and excitement. I still sometimes amaze people with
accounts of how conservative were the politics of the reporters I
worked around in the late 1960s. No hippie lovers, they! No antiwar
types among them. A story didn’t have to be big to deserve
attention. The pounding of leaders — local, state, or national —
had not yet become a routine (played for the sake of the general
betterment). Feature stories about dogs and brides and high school
reunions filled pages and pages. Sports sections lacked social
significance.
Not all readers liked such stuff. Fine: they could go to the
Times and ponder along with James Reston and Flora Lewis.
Along about the time of Watergate — some would say the Vietnam War
— our mass media took up the cudgels for feminism,
environmentalism, busing, and quietude in American foreign policy;
later on, they came out, as we say, for the general acceptance of
gay lifestyles. I generalize, yes. How do you limn a whole
industry? All the fun, all the sheer normality, didn’t seep out of
newspapers and magazines, like air from a balloon, the instant
Richard Nixon abdicated the presidency. With the new earnestness,
anyway, came the new tedium.
Whatever pizzazz journalism might once have had drained away in
the era of the new political and sociological seriousness. My
goodness, the great things we were supposed to be doing, such as
uprooting antique prejudices, fitting the new America for the new
day of tolerance and diversity! Forget the customers — they’ll do
what we tell ‘em.
Forget the customers: Rule No. 1 for the Decline and Fall of
Great Economic Institutions. Go on — bore the customers with bad
writing — the hallmark of 21st-century journalism — and solemn
reports on national problems, just don’t expect them to sit around
with mouths wide open, licking up the insults (intended or
otherwise). It so happened that the age of the Internet coincided
with the age of Forget the Customers. The forgotten, voting with
their dollars and their time, said, essentially, we’re outta here.
And they were.
FOR 2008 NEWSWEEK lost $13.6 million on revenues of
$16.5 million. The whole dead-tree industry dropped its leaves and
undertook a case study in rot. Even television fell into
melancholia while the Internet connected more and more and more:
assuring the customers they could have what they wanted, besides
its being virtually on the house. You go where you find what you
want.
I wouldn’t disclaim exceptions. It happens with the New York
Times that the cooking, home, and science sections are pretty
entertainingly written (as contrasted, say, with the dark side
meditations of Paul Krugman and Frank Rich). Still, for the most
part, the best writing in today’s mags and papers wouldn’t have
received more than a nod of assent some half a century ago. No
James Jackson Kilpatricks now, no Menckens, no Buckleys are around
to weave their spells. Many writers can’t even construct a
grammatical sentence. New York Times ledes (as we properly
spell the word) can run 40-50 words.
When Kilpatrick — for my money the best journalist/writer of
the past half century — moved last August to the great city room
in the sky, I was minded to contrast his art with the gaucheries of
Krugman & Co. I noted that the felicities of a good English
sentence — trimmed, smoothed, well-rounded — strike fewer and
fewer journalists as essential to their trade: possibly because the
purpose of journalism, often as not these days, is to argue readers
into alignment with the day’s approved agenda. Lemme out of here,
modern readers understandably holler.
A fair amount of pontificating has attended the trials of the
print media, the silliest suggestion having come from those who
want the government to subsidize print journalism to assure a
continuous flood of stories such as the customers would seem to
have rejected: stories, no doubt, of deep intensity and public
urgency, guaranteed to glaze the eyes of all but the most earnest
journalism PhDs. Among the fruitful suggestions for implementing
such an agenda: taxing iPads so as to subsidize the pen-and-pad
fraternity. Another: charging, by law, news aggregator websites
(think the Drudge Report) for the use of dead-tree content. The
Federal Trade Commission earlier this year actually held hearings
on these and other lame-brain notions, with no one holding out much
hope for government manipulation as the ultimate answer.
What we may have to do is go back where we came in — to an
industry whose personnel actually liked and understand the
customers. What an idea — understand your customers.
YET HOW WOULD IT BE if newspapers and magazines went back to
rewarding literary merit as opposed to ideological commitment,
especially the kind of commitment mainstream readers find alien to
their own understandings of worth? What about hiring reporters
notable for, as much as anything else, their avoidance of the
Eastern universities that supply so many New York and Washington,
D.C., journalists for the coverage of Big Stories that to many
readers seem infinitesimally small? What about training writers
once again in the composition of feature stories about life in its
complexities and surprises? Even the New York Times has a
few writers of this sort. Don’t tell me the job can’t be done.
Would such a strategy roll back the Internet tide and restore
journalism? You know it wouldn’t and, indeed, couldn’t, so strong
is that tide. The Internet — to give it a common personality —
knows one thing the dead-tree journalists (to which fraternity I
belonged most of my working life) can’t always get their arms
around. It is that change is ceaseless; that nothing lasts; that
adaptation to circumstances — just as the free market economists
have always said — drives progress.
You know, though, Sidney Harman could really, honestly be onto
something. Make the reading experience, again, exciting, enjoyable,
fun (save, of course, on slow news days); make satisfied customers
out of mere high-minded spectators. So moves that liberal bogey —
the free marketplace — whose groans and cries and snarls and
purrings never fail to provide counsel or warning.
