So what magazine would be so desperate for any sort of good news that they'd blitz out a press statement bragging about their lead editor being ranked at the top of his class by a two day old website? Newsweek!

Yesterday we received an email from one of Newsweek's flacks with a subject line that read, "Newsweek's Meacham, most powerful Magazine Editor." Copied into the body of the email was the post by Mediaite's Colby Hall announcing Meacham as the most powerful magazine editor.

Yeah.

After receiving this yesterday afternoon I walked around scratching my head a bit, alternately saddened and angered by the email, but mostly angered. I was angered that a magazine I've enjoyed for a number of years had stooped to such a ridiculous level to try and bring attention to itself. I was angered over the fact that there are people out there who actually give a damn about their ranking on some retarded "Power Grid." So I walked around a bit and thought all of this over and decided that I was going to post something about it on Gawker tonight, only to come home and discover that New York's Will Leitch had beaten me to the punch and written something on the subject at Deadspin that pretty much perfectly captured exactly what I was thinking. Calling Mediaite a "handy reminder of just why everyone hates the media," Leitch wrote:

From my experience, 27 percent of the people who work in media (and I'm using the Mediaite definition of media, which is pretty much "anyone who gets paid for typing, talking or figuring out how to fire people who type or talk") are journalists in the truest sense, out to enlighten the public for common good, altruistic believers in the fourth estate and its power to invoke change. The other 73 percent are pretending to be that 27 percent and really just trying to promote their own personal brand. In the past, this has always been an inside joke, something for media folk to snicker about in private. Mediaite breaks with the pretense and just states what everyone already knew: This is really what it's all about. It's not about informing the public. It's not about being good at your job. It's about being known, and being recognized. Mediaite doesn't damn this, not at all, not nearly as much as they should: They just point it out ... and then they prove it. They're excellent at that.

By far, the most entertaining and popular section of Mediaite is their Power Grid, which ranks reporters, columnists, editors, anchors, executives and talk show hosts by their "buzz" ranking, or some such meaningless word tossed out in a dead conference room somewhere.

But wait, you ask: Isn't the media dying? Yes! It totally is! This is the last gasp. It would make more sense to have a Plumberite, or a Morticianite, or a Forecloserite, you know, professions that are actually growing and have a concrete future. (They make more money than most media people too, and are generally more attractive.) But plumbers and morticians aren't self-indulgent assholes! They don't assume that just because they care about what they're doing, everyone else does. They'd never start a site like that. That's our job.

Yes. Absolutely perfect. The only thing I'd add to this is that the obsession of some over Mediaite's "Power Grid" pretty much confirms something I've long suspected—That of all the narcissism-laden social circles existing in New York City, and I've dipped my toe in most of them, there is none more densely populated with self-important a-holes than the New York media circle. Period. It's actually not even a close race, as the New York media social circle far outdistances all others in terms of pure, unadulterated love of self.

Finally, I feel compelled to add, lest someone accuse me of feeling bitter over my Mediaite ranking or something, that I have no idea if I appear anywhere on any Mediaite "Power Grid" list, though I'm sure someone would have pointed it out to me by now if I did. With that said, is it possible for me to just opt out of any future rankings? I know and like some of the people working at Mediaite, but I don't want any part of this. The whole thing just gives me indigestion when I think about it.

The Real Reason You Should Hate the Media [Deadspin]
pic via

The Scarborough interview, by Johnnie L. Roberts was a "web exclusive." It was posted to Newsweek's web site on Friday afternoon with Roberts' introduction leading with the newsiest bit of the interview: Scarborough's first comments about serving as the defense attorney for Michael Griffin, the anti-abortion zealot who murdered Dr. David Gunn in 1993, and whether that had affected his coverage of the death of Dr. George Tiller. Here's the original introduction:

In the wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, the abortion doctor shot dead in front of his church on May 31, a Village Voice writer had set the blogosphere abuzz about Joe Scarborough. Why had Scarborough's morning news show, "Morning Joe," been silent on the sensational murder story? Was it because Scarborough, as a young lawyer in Pensacola, Florida, had helped defend one of the nation's first murderers of an abortion doctor 16 years ago?

"We covered it as a news story, Scarborough told NEWSWEEK during an interview about his new book, "The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America's Promise." Scarborough says he condemns the Tiller murder, and has since talked about his involvement in the 1993 Florida case on his show. "I'm an attorney," he says. "I represented clients. I did it as a favor to the family. The goal was to stop this young man from trying to defend himself."

Purchasers of his book won't read about this time in Scarborough's past, though he does advise conservatives to stop demanding that Washington become entangled in "gay marriage debates and ob-gyn issues." The morning news anchor spoke to NEWSWEEK's Johnnie L. Roberts about his book, Rush Limbaugh and how conservatives lost their way.

That went up Friday afternoon; by Friday night it was gone, replaced with an anodyne introduction that didn't mention Griffin or Tiller. Roberts' exchange with Scarborough about Griffin was still in the interview, but moved down into the body of the Q-and-A. And it no longer contained a reference to the criticism that Morning Joe gave short shrift to the Tiller murder or that Scarborough's book—curiously, for a work that deals with the politics of abortion and extremism—omits his relationship with Griffin. And that troublesome link to the Village Voice's reporting on Scarborough's past was also gone. The time-stamp—"Updated: 3:02 p.m. ET Jun 5, 2009"—remained unchanged, giving readers no clue that the introduction had been completely rewritten.

Why? We asked Newsweek editor Meacham:

On Friday, a member of Scarborough's team (not Scarborough) reached out when the original story, which led with Griffin, was posted; when I read it, I thought it was better to include that material in the flow of the interview, where it is now on Newsweek.com.

Scarborough himself claims that he had no idea that a member of his "team" was putting pressure on Meacham, a frequent Morning Joe guest, to soften the magazine's coverage of him. "I've never talked to Jon about the article," he says via e-mail, "and never saw the version of the intro you're talking about." Did he ask someone to harass Meacham on his behalf? "No. Below my radar. Again, I didn't know it was even up for a few days. Had a big family get together and didn't spend my weekend inside online."

We don't believe you, Joe. Here's a screengrab of the original introduction:

Colbert's guest stint will mark the first time that Newsweek, which recently underwent it's second major design reconstruction in three years, has ever used a guest editor in its 76-year history. Meacham told The Observer how the idea came about.

Mr. Meacham said the idea was born from a lunch he had with Mr. Colbert at Gabriel's near Columbus Circle.

"I was just very impressed with the range of his knowledge and he had an almost encyclopedic feel for anything that came up," said Mr. Meacham. "As we think about ways to both inform and surprise readers of the magazine, the notion of having him as a guest editor seemed like a good one."

Meacham denied that the decision to bring Colbert in was a stunt similar to Tina Brown's bringing in Roseanne Barr to edit the New Yorker in 1995.

Mr. Meacham said his inspiration was when Bono served as guest editor of the Africa issue in Vanity Fair in July 2007.

"The notion of having someone who cares deeply about an issue and who wants to do something more than being profiled or writing a single piece has some appeal to us," said Mr. Meacham.

The Observer piece says that Colbert will write an essay for the issue, help design its cover, hand out assignments, pick pull-quotes to highlight, and feature "a number of unpublished letters to the editor Mr. Colbert has written to Newsweek since he was a kid."

Desperate PR stunt or not, we think it sounds like the most fun week of work Newsweek staffers will ever have at the magazine.

Newsweek Turns to Tina Tricks: Meet Guest Editor … Stephen Colbert! [New York Observer]
Image via Collider

In a message in the new edition of the magazine, assistant managing editor Kathleen Deveny explained the thinking behind the redesign.

There is a type of NEWSWEEK story that I used to love. In the 12 years that I have been an editor here, we have done hundreds of them. When the stock market plunged on a Friday (back when that was rare) or a gunman opened fire on Capitol Hill or a celebrity contracted a fatal disease, we "scrambled the jets," sending reporters out into the field with orders to file dispatches to writers waiting in New York or Washington. We killed ourselves to dig up one or two exclusive news nuggets and find a few fresh photos. We stayed up all night, writing, editing and producing stories, pushing up against our deadlines. It was fun-thrilling, really. We told ourselves it was NEWSWEEK at its best. And for a long time, it was.

And now it's not. In a world of endless Yahoo headlines, Wall Street Journal e-mail alerts and 24/7 cable coverage, scrambling the jets isn't enough. News has become a commodity. You can find the kinds of stories that we used to do as covers-scientific breakthroughs or trends like white-collar layoffs-on the front page of The New York Times. Web sites like The Huffington Post and Politico.com are siphoning off readers. And even as the daily buzz of information rises around us, our advertisers have turned away, or fallen on hard times themselves. Revenue and ad pages have declined. We reduced our workforce by 160 people to around 400, mostly through a voluntary retirement program. Last year, the magazine's 75th, NEWSWEEK slipped into the red.

Deveny goes on to explain that the magazine's redesign strategy relies heavily on a similar approach taken by their overseas edition of Newsweek, an experiment of sorts that resulted in an increase in both ad pages and profits. Their aim is place Newsweek directly into competition for a readership base more historically aligned with magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, a strategy that they seem to be convinced is their only hope for survival.

It's Newsweek's second revamping in three years, having undergone another facelift in 2007. At the time editor Jon Meacham told the Post's Keith Kelly, "what we are trying to do here is clear out the clutter and speak in a print vernacular."

The new issue's cover features a Meacham Q&A with President Obama aboard Air Force One, a piece that contains this insightful exchange:

And as you divide up your time, when do you steal the time to do that?
I'm a night owl. My usual day [is]: I work out in the morning; I get to the office around 9, 8:30 a.m. to 9 a.m.; work till about 6:30 p.m.; have dinner with the family, hang out with the kids and put them to bed about 8:30 p.m. And then I'll probably read briefing papers or do paperwork or write stuff until about 11:30 p.m., and then I usually have about a half hour to read before I go to bed … about midnight, 12:30 a.m.-sometimes a little later.

Wait, Obama doesn't get into the office until 9 a.m.? There's something simultaneously reassuring and troubling in learning that.

Reinventing Newsweek [Newsweek]
A Highly Logical Approach [Newsweek]

NPR is laying off 13 employees and sending all employees on five-day furloughs to help close an $8 million budget gap this year. Oh and in a new creative twist they're also not paying employees for three standard holidays this year, so there's a new and exciting tactic to try out and screw your workers with, corporate plutocrats! Who's to blame for this? You, for not donating enough. If you have some interesting NPR layoff dirt to share, email us.


Newsweek editor Jon Meacham is writing a new biography of Dubya Dubya's dad. [We corrected the subject of the book here, but we leave the subsequent snide comments]. Who wants to read more about that guy? No idea. Maybe he's done some interesting stuff, since getting the fuck out of office? Newsweek editor Jon Meacham aims to do some findin' out of that.


Now we take a big deep breath and spit out all the bad newspaper news of the day all at once: McClatchy and the NYT Co. ("four notches into junk") had their debt ratings cut, pay cuts at the Star Tribune and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Boston Phoenix, and asshole CEO of the broke-ass bankrupt Philly papers, Brian Tierney, made $1.175 million last year, including hundreds of thousands in bonuses and 81K for "transportation costs," and another exec there called his own pay "very low," so suck on that, newsroom.


New York magazine is cutting two issues this summer, and one in January, because they can't sell enough ads for them.

And in an admirable bit of public service, Keith Olbermann has pledged to give $1,000 for every second that Fox manimal Sean Hannity has himself waterboarded, as he said he would do. Sean?

Just look at the examples above: "Lincoln vs Darwin"! "The Religious Case For Gay Marriage"! "Global Warning Is a Hoax*/Not really lulz ROFL"!

This is the template for the future, editor Jon "The Economist, Please Marry Me" Meacham told the Journal:

"Covers like Lincoln v. Darwin is what the redesign is all about... We are trying to be more provocative."

...Recently, Newsweek has emphasized commentary on hot-button issues, such as gay marriage, by big-name journalists like editor Jon Meacham and international editor Fareed Zakaria, as well as contributions from political operatives and academics like Michael Beschloss and Sean Wilentz.

The idea is to just kind of sit back and pontificate on the world, like The Economist, without the need for all those pricey reporters everywhere. Then elite, smart people will read the magazine, which will become a "thought leader," as anonymous Newsweekers phrased it in Folio Tuesday, and advertisers will pay a premium. Meanwhile the magazine will save on postage since it won't have to mail anything to the poors!

But of course people who fancy themselves "thought leaders" hungry for global news opinion can just order The Economist, which has way more snob appeal than Newsweek. Meanwhile confused pediatricians and dentists will stop ordering the magazine for their waiting rooms, due to the increasingly inflammatory covers; bloggers will mock the magazine for going tabloidy; and Matt Drudge will finally hire Michael Isikoff away to write for Drudge Report directly, since if you're going to do investigative journalism on behalf of a spinmeister you might as well work for the big, growing one with lots of extra money.

Christopher Hitchens comes at the Clinton issue as an old-timey Leftist (leftists hate liberals!) and also a drunken contrarian, but his comments and criticisms have been accepted by the resolute centrists of the DC press corps as a, bizarrely, an argument against Clinton with a great deal of popular support. The opinion of Chris Hitchens represents the views of precisely one person on this planet. He is representative of no one on the left, right, or in the center. You wouldn't know that from listening to Joe Scarborough:

Scarborough: "What he said may resonate with some of her critics."

By "some of her critics," he meant the press.

Scarborough: "Hitchens last night weighed in on it and basically spoke for a lot of Hillary detractors."

By "a lot of Hillary detractors," he meant the press.

Scarborough: "He talked about...concerns that a lot of Clinton detractors may be bringing up."

Scarbrough's Clinton hatred is natural—he's an old GOP congressman from the Gingrich era, hating Clinton was his political job. But Chris Matthews, blue-collar catholic millionaire Democrat television personality, has hated Bill for his terrible moral failings since forever. He's pissed that we're not "done with the Clintons." As is Maureen Dowd, who repeated the tired line about Clinton besmirching the pristine White House just a few weeks ago. That's the line the DC press corps has followed since the terrible Clintons showed up in Washington in 1992—these idiot outsiders are marching into town like they own the place! They're ruining the furniture!

The White House, home to Nixon and LBJ and various slave-owners since its construction, has been the organized crime capital of the nation more times than we can count, but it was fellatio that destroyed the dignity and honor of the office.

For a taste of how weird and pervasive and completely out-of-touch this attitude is, watch Newsweek editor Jon Meacham's Daily Show interview from last night. He makes two out-of-left-field context-free Clinton jokes that just fall completely flat, and he seems befuddled that not everyone else thinks it's self-evident that the Clintons were uncouth maniacs akin to the intoxicated mob of commoners who destroyed the White House during Andrew Jackson's inauguration. And Meacham, editor of Newsweek, is the best possible example of a serious, middle-of-the-road serious Washington Press Corps member.

So the firestorm over the Hillary Clinton SecState gig is almost entirely imagined. We have our own issues with it, but they'd apply equally to about two dozen other prominent Democrats, especially Senators. It's just bizarre to see that the no one remembers the lesson of the '90s: that it can and will get so, so much worse.

After working on the attached cover all week and making multiple modifications, the cover was killed late Friday night. Why? The wife of the editor stopped by, apparently saw the cover and expressed her disapproval. Amazingly, the previously approved cover, worked on all week, was killed. I guess we know who has the final say...

The editor of Newsweek, proud 13-year veteran staffer Jon Meacham, ran a defensive, hand-wringing editor's note about the cover package, so it's entirely possible he switched the cover of his own accord — the one at left having undergone "multiple modifications" already per our tipster. But it's also not difficult, thanks to that same, hedging editor's letter, to imagine Meacham pushed to the point of overhaul by the slightest gust, such as a stray comment from his low-profile wife Keith, a schools administrator most recently at Harlem Day Charter.

And it's also worth bearing in mind that Meacham, suddenly a contender to replace Len Downie at the Post, is now important enough to have the sort of enemies who spread a story like this, true or not. Our ears are open for further details and alternative narratives.