As this blog has been reporting for the last few months, the national periodical called ‘Newsweek’ is in spiral def con three meteoric decline. In this, they seem to be sharing the fate of newspapers everywhere. But Newsweek will not go quietly. They have been cycling through every pulp trick in the book of late, starting with aliens, true crime and made up stories and then branching out to US Magazine territory with some celebrity suckage.
It’s been a weird and rapid progression. Quite the most astounding plumbing of pulpdom I have ever seen. I was going to let the dust settle a tad--basically because the magazine has been boring--but my boys have drawn a lot of heat with their latest cloying attempt to grab attention.
I honestly don’t know if anyone at Newsweek is consciously conjuring all of the pulp tricks. These death spin tactics have been detailed in our feature Real Nazi Sex UFO Man-Eater Cults on the website www.hil-gle.com. This history piece is off the front page now, but still can be found in the Modern Thrills listing. Newsweek and a section on the new pulps may be added shortly if this trend continues.
Newsweek has become a teaser pulp: a magazine which promises something far more titillating on its cover than its contents actually deliver. This is the mysterious level above utter tabloid-dom last attempted by Argosy during the end of that magazine’s run. It worked for Argosy and True for a very long time and we can only wish Newsweek the best. If successful, Newsweek’s efforts would represent something of a de-sleazing of popular magazine fare. Just as Maxim was able to capture the market once monopolized by Playboy by putting clothing back on the girls, perhaps Newsweek can take away part of the tabloid market with its 'just a whiff of sensation' approach.
As it is, there is no news magazine market. Or at least not one worth being in second or third place in. The people at Kaplan, who own both Newsweek and the Washington Post, have made a very reasonable decision in trying to reposition the title. There’s no CNN Time Warner grandpappy to amortize Newsweek’s losses across multiple platforms of media. Other than being a knock off of Time, Newsweek never really had any special cache. Newsweek isn’t a vanity press, existing only to keep the publisher’s face firmly talking as an important head on television, as is US News & World Report. Newsweek has to make money. Newsweek has to sell advertising. Newsweek needs to find itself an audience pronto or Newsweek is a dead puppy.
I hate to see any magazine die. (Except perhaps Playgirl.) And I am a pulp magazine historian, so I am rooting Newsweek on. I fear they are not sticking with various genre themes long enough to see if they have an impact. On the other hand, someone at Newsweek may know that these themes are tried and true and the game is to trot them out on a rotational basis. If you touch on enough of these themes--UFOs, mad science projects, true crime and the like--you can always come back to them as an authoritative voice should something topical happen. Certainly the title, Newsweek or New Week (a title Newsweek has been trying out), is broad enough to cover all of the themes. Indeed, if this is the overall map by which they are sailing, then I like their chances and heartily approve.
But it doesn’t look that way. It looks like they are flailing. There’s something of a disconnection between Newsweek’s cover story and its normal features. The magazine’s fine stable of commentators--or print bloggers, if you will—have taken to ignoring the cover stories altogether. They appear to be the last to know what the big deal is this week and instead write a thousand words or so about whatever itches their holes. Without a unified theme, or it seems any form of editorial direction other than “please, don’t quit”, the results have been a bit hit or miss. And they have a great staff.
The pulp cover features have been uneven, also. What they construe as a new take on an old genre comes off only as not knowing how to do it straight in the first place. The magazine seems to constantly need to call in for help. By help, I mean they call in people from Hollywood. Sometimes they just douse the place with Hollywood crap and call it a day, as if they cannot distinguish between fiction and reality. Somewhere along the way they back-doored into a new form of celebrity glomming: becoming a vanity press for B-List politicians. First they let the Vice President write an issue and then they let Al Gore write an issue.
Then they ran out of unemployed politicians of any national appeal. (Or ones that had time and/or an axe to grind/cause.) So they went back to pulp. In the last issue, they did counterfactuals, a mainstay of the Weider history magazines. This was a full blown swipe, is what it was. They even copied the cover theme of using spot color over a black and white photograph. The Weider magazines, themselves thoroughly descended from pulps of old (and owned by the National Enquirer), use this style because they generally are dealing with images that were originally shot in black and white. Also, they’ve had this type of presentation since they were pulp magazines. The spot color overlay was initiated as a way of offsetting production costs. Note to Newsweek: Viet Nam was in color. Check your own back issues.
The Weider magazines sell pretty gosh darn well and have a nice base of specialty advertisers. Someone over at Kaplan figured this out and ordered Newsweek to Xerox one off. Why not? They’ve tried all the other pulp genres. But they didn’t do their homework. Viet Nam does not sell. It and the Korean War are the two topics you will never see covered. Even Martin Goodman couldn’t sell those wars.
Newsweek’s ‘How We Won In Viet Nam’ broke new ground in irrelevance, undercutting itself as an analogy to the current war from the onset and then attempting to half heartedly reclaim such throughout. It did not belong in a magazine. It was not even a thought, much less thought out. This is the height of confused nose blowing.
As opposed to the cover feature, the highlight of that issue was someone returning George Will’s testes. Will decided to comment on a cover theme, but not this issue’s. He went after last issue with a hearty “Al Gore is an idiot and his climate change thing is ten year old recycled scare porn.” Then someone did something to George Will’s last paragraph that made it seem as if the old boy’s shower had just run out of hot water. The closing was along the lines of “September 11th, gotta go now.” Is anyone over at Newsweek reading Newsweek?
Having done politician vanity press, Newsweek’s latest issue is going all stone throwing celeb baiting ala Confidential on the former Alaskan head of state. Again, they’ve screwed up the genre of celeb baiting. You catch the subject in an unflattering pose or between expressions. You don’t plaster them in cheesecake. That defeats the point! You can put ‘America’s Most Dangerous Woman’ in 72 point red and all the eye is going to see when contrasted with that photo is ‘America’s Hottest MILF.' Worse, you’ve elevated a jackass to a threat—and I speak as someone who shares the majority of Sarah Palin’s political views. But she is a jackass. A va-va-voom jackass, apparently.
Besides, you’re missing a beat. She’s unemployed. She’s a politician. You’ve already initiated this politician vanity press genre. If you want to prove she’s a threat or a jackass, GIVE HER THE PEN. Let her write an issue. That way you can use the week to research sea monsters.
There’s still time on this. You might actually draw for two issues in a row if you play it smart.
No comments:
Post a Comment