Newsweek

As promised on May 20, I’m reviewing the redesigned Newsweek. The first couple of issues get a C+ for format and content. The June 15 issue may improve its grade as Stephen Colbert is guest editor. It promises much, based on the cover photo of him losing his hair to a fade that spells Iraq and the headline on his guest editorial: “Why I took this crummy job.”

Anticipating the publication of this issue, the New York Observer remarked “Newsweek Turns to Tina Tricks,” as it recalled the New Yorker under Tina Brown who called in guest editor Roseanne. The move is still considered a flop by pretty much everyone, including Tina.

Back at Newsweek, things have been extremely mixed. I commented earlier on the format, and my opinion hasn’t changed. In fact I put down the June 8 issue and then scoured the house looking for it because I thought it was an advertising supplement. Mind you, we only receive four periodicals and the rest are monthlies. We’ve eliminated catalogs and junk mail. Once I found the June 8 issue I nearly overlooked the “Back Story” “Who Owns the United States?” because, again, it looked like an ad or like a diagram of cuts of meat from my parents’ old Joy of Cooking. As to content, I thought the first “reinvented” issue lacked focus. The series on Iran was much too long and did not contain much new information, even though it claimed that everything we knew about the country is wrong. The timeline that ran along the bottom for pages and pages made me dizzy and treated all events equally. I don’t remember a single item from it.

Some of the shorter articles have promise. The same issue profiled the man who invented quantitative finance, which Matthew Philips explained so that even a neophyte like me could understand it. And the profile of Chris Dodd with a look back at his father Senator Tom, drew some fascinating parallels (and contrasts). Of course, I may be biased about the significance of that article since they are from Connecticut. Oprah’s fans are striking back over “Crazy Talk,” criticizing The Queen for adopting junk science, though there several letters praised the article for its accuracy.

And what’s up with the six-word opinions? Newsweek is slimming down Twitter and stealing from Smith magazine, which has been doing six-word memoirs for three years. Other folks seem to dislike the changes as much as I do. Michael Kinsley wrote in “Backward Runs the News” in The New Republic, “It is cluttered with departments and headlines and labels and tiny features, all of which imply some hierarchy or order in the editors’ minds, but only add to the chaos in the readers’. Its longer pieces follow all the stale conventions of newsmagazine prose.”

In a lighter vein, AOL’s Daily Finance writer Jeff Berovici accused Newsweek of stealing from the late, great Spy.  Its founder was justifiably proud. May it live on in imitations everywhere. The new Newsweek may be like a new restaurant that needs a couple of months to get into the flow of things, so I may revisit the issue at the end of the summer.