I bet this won't be good for the stockholders.... - Granite Grok

I bet this won’t be good for the stockholders….

From the New York Times (free registration required)….. 

I am not one of those bloggers that thinks that the Main Stream Media ("MSM") is totally useless.  Biased?  For sure, dude.  Yet they still have two important functions:

Gather the news and report it (please, just try to report the new correctly!)

Act as foundations for blogger opinions (or cannon fodder if they don’t do #1 right)

Recent circulation ratings for most branded newspaper and news magazines have been tanking, along with share holder value, for quite some time.  With this announcement, I’m glad to report that I have no holding in this company:

For most of the 20th century, under the influence of its founder, Henry R. Luce, Time magazine spoke in a single authoritative voice that reflected the world back to its readers.

Now Richard Stengel, the new managing editor of Time, wants to change the metaphor.

“We’ve traditionally been a mirror, and to me, we more and more have to be a lamp,” Mr. Stengel said, invoking the title of the study of Romantic literature by M. H. Abrams. “As a lamp, you’re shining a light on something.”

Ah yes, the old "Let’s shape our world; let’s make it a better place for all" meme!   

So far, Mr. Stengel has drawn attention to the magazine by hiring Ana Marie Cox, a writer known less for her journalistic chops than for her previous job writing heavily opinionated posts on the gossip blog Wonkette.

Can we modify that a bit to her "heavily opinionated posts, full of four letter words"?  Sure, that will pave the way – hire someone that was popular within the DC beltway – THAT will go over well in fly-over country….

He has also highlighted articles that are largely reported essays, like the cover story about the Middle East in the July 31 issue, “The Way Out,” by Michael Elliott. “It’s about having an idea that is different,” Mr. Stengel said. “I want to have people talk about what we’re writing about.”

Opinion peices will do that.  Having news articles being opinionated will do that too – but not for the same reason.  Especially when this is taken into the calculus:

Time, whose parent company Time Inc. is owned by Time Warner, has a higher circulation — roughly four million, to three million for Newsweek, which is owned by the Washington Post Company. But both magazines face the difficult challenge of being relevant in a weekly news cycle that competes against the Internet and cable, daily breaking news and analysis from newspapers, and long-form narrative and investigative articles from monthly magazines like Vanity Fair.

Stephen G. Smith, the Washington bureau chief of The Houston Chronicle, who was the executive editor of Newsweek from 1986 to 1991 and served as the Nation editor at Time from 1978 to 1986, said the influence and prestige of the newsweeklies had eroded over the years

No kidding. 

 

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