Month: May 2010

Meet the new Big Three weekly news magazines

With the Washington Post Co. having put money-losing Newsweek up for sale, you’re going to hear a lot about how we’ve gone from three weekly news magazines to one (Time) if Newsweek isn’t rescued. (U.S. News & World Report lives, but it hasn’t been a weekly for years.) Cue the dirge.

Except that it’s not true. If Newsweek goes down, we’ll simply have a new Big Three: Time, The Economist and The Week. And unlike the Time/Newsweek/U.S. News trio, which at their peak were all more or less clones of each other, the three survivors have distinctly different missions. The Economist offers a smart, analytical take on the news. The Week is a digest. And Time is — well, who knows these days? Politics, pop culture and lists of stuff, I guess.

You’ll often hear people say that Newsweek and U.S. News were the victims of larger forces, and that the weekly news-magazine genre is no longer relevant. But if that were true, why were they overtaken by competitors within that genre?

And yes, I recognize that The Economist and especially The Week are bare-bones operations compared to the American news magazines in their prime. The fact is, they’re here — and they’re thriving. Newsweek and U.S. News were not done in by cable TV and blogs. They were done in by leaner, smarter competitors who had a better idea of what a weekly news magazine should be.

After all, their various owners never figured out how to overtake Time, either.

The Globe’s opinion pages beef up

Joshua Green

A year ago, the biggest question at the Boston Globe was whether the New York Times Co. was serious about shutting it down if it couldn’t squeeze out $20 million in union concessions.

These days, the story is considerably more pleasant. Though no one thinks the Globe is entirely out of the woods (there is, after all, a revolution under way), the paper keeps expanding in modest but useful ways.

The latest initiative is coming tomorrow: a weekly column on the op-ed page by the Atlantic’s fine political writer, Joshua Green, who, according to Globe editorial-page editor Peter Canellos, will offer a Washington perspective from a non-ideological perspective.

“He’s a pure reporter and analyst,” Canellos says. “And I think that for somebody looking at the changing landscape of Washington these days, this is a happy meeting of a writer and subject, because it’s a fascinating time.”

This coming Sunday will mark a significant expansion of the opinion pages. For years, the Globe has published a third opinion page, reserved for letters, every other week. Now the paper will publish three and four pages on an alternating schedule.

Newish op-ed columnists Joanna Weiss and Lawrence Harmon will join standbys Joan Vennochi and Jeff Jacoby. Harmon, the Globe’s chief editorial writer on city issues, will continue to write his column once a week. Weiss will now write twice weekly, picking up Harmon’s Tuesday slot.

On weeks when there are four opinion pages, Canellos says, the extra space will be used for features such as “visual op-eds” by cartoonist Dan Wasserman and longer essays by columnist James Carroll and other writers.

Finally, Canellos says that a somewhat nebulous new online feature called “The Angle” will be beefed up with some definition and some original content as the result of a new partnership with “Radio Boston,” which WBUR (90.9 FM) is expanding from a weekly to a daily program next week.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Warren Buffett on the Goldman Sachs case

Interesting to see that Warren Buffett’s take on Goldman Sachs is essentially the same as mine. Goldman is being investigated on charges that it did not disclose to investors that hedge-fund manager John Paulson helped put together an investment vehicle that he then bet against.

Buffett’s view, writes Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times, is that such information is irrelevant as long as investors knew what they were buying. Buffett put it this way:

For the life of me, I don’t see whether it makes any difference whether it was John Paulson on the other side of the deal, or whether it was Goldman Sachs on the other side of the deal, or whether it was Berkshire Hathaway on the other side of the deal….

It’s very strange to say, at the end of the transaction, that if the other guy is smarter than you, that you have been defrauded. It seems to me that that’s what they are saying.

The scandal that nearly brought down the entire financial system wasn’t what was illegal — it was what was legal.

Now if only I shared Buffett’s investing acumen.

The Nation goes open-source

The Nation, the leading left-liberal opinion journal, has launched a slick new website using Drupal, an open-source content-management system that’s free and can be tweaked by anyone. “If he understood open source, Glenn Beck might well denounce it as a socialist practice,” writes Peter Rothberg.

A bit of an exaggeration, given that Drupal is used by such diverse organizations as GateHouse Media and the White House. (Oh, wait …)

The best news for media junkies is that Greg Mitchell’s blog, Media Fix, has finally made its long-awaited debut. Mitchell, the former editor of Editor & Publisher, is a double-barreled master of the tweet, posting what seems like 18 hours a day at @GregMitch and @MediaFixBlog. His blog goes straight into my Google Reader list.

Like its more moderate counterpart, The New Republic, The Nation will reserve some of its premium content for paying customers, writes editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. A shame, since opinion journals are trafficking in influence, not revenue.

Nevertheless, I suspect TheNation.com will quickly prove to be more widely read (if it isn’t already) than the rather hidebound print edition.

John Odgren is hospitalized; Paul Levy apologizes

Two late-breaking developments:

  • John Odgren, convicted last week of killing a fellow student, James Alenson, at Lincoln Sudbury Regional High School, has been committed to Bridgewater State Hospital, reports Northeastern criminologist James Alan Fox. Someone, at least, is approaching this case with some compassion.
  • Paul Levy, president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has issued a statement from the board and a personal apology for the behavior that led to a kerfuffle last week. What exactly happened remains murky, but perhaps this is all we’re entitled to know. It seems to me that he’s handled this as straightforwardly as can be expected. He remains as respected a public citizen as we have in Boston, and I hope this is the end of it.

From talking about it to just doing it

[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=110849334117410151532.00048518b4ffdc95dd0ae&ll=41.656497,-72.388916&spn=2.872863,5.493164&z=7&output=embed&w=500&h=350]
When I first started teaching a course called Reinventing the News a few years ago, I envisioned it mainly as a seminar. The idea was that we would look at some case studies of where the news business might be headed and blog about it.

I quickly realized that wasn’t good enough. The spark for me was a student who had just come back from her co-op job at the Patriot Ledger of Quincy. She had assumed the most complicated tool she’d have to use would be a notebook. Instead, she was tossed a point-and-shoot digital camera and told to teach herself how to capture and edit video. She liked it so much she ended up changing her career goals from print to video.

It was with some trepidation that I began adding three weeks of Web video to Reinventing a year and a half ago. First, I had to teach myself how to do it. And it required exposing some vulnerabilities. I knew some students would be starting from zero, but I also knew that others were already better at video journalism than I’d ever be. Nevertheless, it proved to be well worth it.

Last week we finished the most complex version of Reinventing I’ve offered, and my students had to pull together a variety of skills for their final project. The assignment was to use free online tools to create a multimedia story. The elements:

  • An 800- to 1,000-word story about a digital media project that had caught their eye, written up as a blog post with relevant links.
  • A slide show of six to 10 still photos, posted to Flickr and embedded in their blog.
  • A two- to five-minute video they shot and edited, posted to YouTube and also embedded in their blog.
  • An explanation of how they used social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to find sources and report their story.

At the end of it all, they were asked to note the location of their story on a Google map and link to their blog post. The result is the map I’ve embedded above. I invite you to explore. These young journalists did a terrific job, and I am very proud of them.

If you click on “View Reinventing the News: Final Projects in a larger map,” directly under the embedded map, you’ll find the list of students on the left-hand side. Click on a name to find his or her spot on the map, each one of which is linked directly to their project. Hmmm … Google could make this a little bit simpler, eh?

I’ll be teaching Reinventing again this fall, and I will continue to refine. My first thought is that I ought to dump the brief wiki exercise I offer and instead delve more deeply into how to handle comments. Any thoughts you have would be welcome.