So long, Newsweek. I’m going to miss you.
Like many (but not nearly enough, apparently), I have been following with some amount of trepidation the new year because I knew that Newsweek‘s print self was coming to an end. And so it has. The last issue of Newsweek arrived the other day, and all the adults in our house huddled around it to see what the end of the magazine would look like. Sure, the venerable and scrappy magazine is now headed online and there are hopes by its owners and top editors (including Tina Brown) that Newsweek will survive and maybe even thrive as an entire digital magazine.
But, well, I don’t know. It’s sad to see print fade away like this. I’ve looked forward to every Tuesday for decades because that was the day when Newsweek and The New Yorker would arrive together in my mail. Sometimes, if there was a delay, it would be on Wednesday. Beyond that, and I would get frustrated. Where is my Newsweek? I’d ask my wife, as if she were hiding it somewhere. At school, I get Time magazine, but it isn’t the same. There was always something about the writing and the layout, and yet, it must be more than that. I suspect it has to do with the emotional resonance that a magazine can bring.
And I’m not sure a digital magazine can replicate that experience. It can certainly bring other things to the table — embedded media, direct links to other content, etc. But the arrival of a notice in my email inbox just does not compare to the arrival of the magazine in the mailbox at the end of our driveway. For me, magazines hold such promise — I am always curious about what stories lay beyond the cover story. What unexpected nugget will I discover just by flipping through the pages. What will I learn today? It’s the same feeling I get with the morning newspaper, and one I don’t ever get from reading news online. It’s the “old guard” in me, I suspect, who remembers the black inked fingers from delivering newspapers as a child and the late nights pounding out stories on deadline during my tenure as a journalist. I don’t get those same feelings from digital content.
It’s not like I ever relied on Newsweek for breaking news, either. But I did rely on it to help me make sense of the world, and to put the breaking news in perspective. In this day and age of flash news and headlines driving everything, I always appreciated the chance to dive into a longer piece that required me to think, analyze, reflect. Newsweek consistently brought me new perspectives on world events.
I don’t blame Newsweek for taking the plunge away from print and into the digital. It’s been on life support for a few years and it comes as no surprise that they had to do something. I don’t anticipate the magazine surviving, though, even with Brown at the helm. There’s just too much information clutter out there. Newsweek has offered to extend subscriptions to its digital edition, and I did sign up and added it to my wife’s iPad, but I am not at a place where I spent a lot of time reading magazines on the screen. In fact, the iPad often sits buried in a drawer, so it’s not like our regular reading device. I like to hold the news in my hands, leave a magazine open on the couch as I get a snack or rush to get my son to a sports game, return hours later to keep reading or find something new because the dog has turned the page with his tail, wander over to my wife or kids with an article I think might interest them, put it in the magazine pile and rediscover the issue weeks later. Those days, alas, are now gone.
So long, Newsweek. It’s been great to read you. I’m going to miss you.
Peace (in the news),
Kevin