I Am Not Making This Up

The update on Alex Hillman is now live. Despite all of my efforts to the contrary, I already found a glaring typo.

Sigh.

I will flog my staff come morning.

(You people have dirty minds. I mean I will abuse my non-existant help, not non-existant self. Get your freaking minds out of the gutter. Sheesh.)

I understand the CEO of BP "wants his life back." I am sure he will get it, sans the snazzy job. It's amazing when guys like this turn out to be not at all worth the money. Imagine if a lowly BP PR guy had said that, even in jest, even in a private email meant only for in the company eyes and it somehow managed to get out. I wonder how long it would take for him to be fired? Would he even be allowed to pick up his miserable work belongings the next day? I highly doubt it. I'm sure Mister High and Mighty can just bullet point this on his resume under the heading of "willingness to be unpopular" and merrily go back to his daily routine of being genuflected at. Some day, in hell, he will answer for this. Some day, in hell, he will lick up all the oil off our coastline.

I guess the good news is that he got Bobby Jindal to sound like a southerner. I don't mean like a blow dried new south southerner, either. The Louisiana Governor had the intonation of a red neck about to go on a rampage. That limey had better make with the cash pronto or old Bobby's gonna stick his nose in the sand until all of the mess is sucked up. It's fun to watch Republicans grow spines. What a shame it is that the only known cause for such is when the vaunted free enterprise system takes a long lingering dump on something they love.

An interesting little tidbit has recently emerged: If BP were a person, it would be serving a 60 years to life sentence. And that's just for crimes it has already been convicted of in the recent past. That sounds like the sort of in depth subject that one might cover on a website, if one had the time, or perhaps a news magazine. Speaking of which...

Newsweek Surrenders
I know I am about two weeks late with this, but Newsweek has declared that it is for sale. Its corporate parent has given up and is now willing to listen to any reasonable offer for the business. Riddle me this, Batman: What is a money losing magazine worth?

It hasn't been worth much to Kaplan, the private college help you cheat on entrance tests company that owns it. Newsweek has been a money suck since day one. Kaplan kept it for the prestige value. Now it seems that the old hood ornament has proven too expensive, almost to the point where it might shave a cent or so off the old moneybags parent's earnings. Given that they have more money than anyone who is likely to buy it--and that they couldn't save it--what real hope is there that someone actually in the distressed publishing business might? Can odds be expressed in negative numbers?

Don't tell this to the editor of Newsweek, though. He's positively giddy that a "billionaire" will show any time to save it. And he's just as positive that such fictional fool will continue with the path of halving Newsweek's subscription base. (I am not making this up. Making Newsweek go out to half the people it currently does is part of his stated plan--a plan that is a failure and yet a plan he reiterated in what one hopes is one of his last nearly incomprehensible letters to Newsweek's dwindling readership.) For bonus points, in the same issue that he announced his quest to find a billionaire fairy godmother,our thrill a minute, rocket scientist editor played ambush man all over Billy Graham's son Franklin while hiding behind one of his reporter's skirts. I think that if there wasn't a lady present, Franklin might have just popped the guy. Let us hope that in the future our editor is kept away from news magazines, television cameras and random betters that he is bent on insulting. Without the job, after all, he's just another far leftist, thuggish yack. Plenty of them on the unemployment line, I understand.

That said, I don't entirely disagree with the direction Newsweek was heading in. That is, when it seemed to be heading in one. We here at Hil-Gle are very pro pulp magazine and think that Newsweek would have made a fine addition to the world of scare pulps. There's plenty of room between the National Enquirer and Time that it could have staked out, if it really wanted to maintain its dignity as a less popular, less well funded rip off of a news weekly.

Of course, you continue to do the big story, if there is one. You just take it from a more mean spirited angle. Case in Point: BP, Corporate Criminal. Subheader: Even before the spill, BP has run up a record of crimes against the environment, against people worldwide and against the rule of law itself. If you can't tar and feather the freak of the week, then you do True Crime. Or you cover events in places people don't normally hear about--like Mother Jones does, like Soldier of Fortune used to do, like even Hustler used to do. We do have a continuing crisis of public corruption in this country. That could be a regular feature. You might even want to manufacture some news. You know, like the Washington Post used to do? You do remember the Washington Post, right? It's in the same building. Hint: it's the publication Kaplan isn't selling. There's really still plenty of room for you on a path other than halving your circulation in order to trail Time even more distantly.

If I were a billionaire (full disclosure: I am not) and I was interested in owning a news magazine (full disclosure: Newsweek would not be my first choice) I would most distinctly take the magazine downmarket. That's really where the action is: writing things people want to read. The problem wasn't that the direction was wrong, but rather that it was poorly done. The editorial poobahs had a grounding in reality that came straight out of Hollywood. Everything was referenced to entertainment topics. The poor commentator staff was reduced to having a page each and then tasked with either contributing to or ignoring each issue's inane designated theme. More damningly, it was phoned in. That's really what killed it.

In the end, I think it's just going to vanish. Anyone who thinks that a billionaire is going to save them is also the type of person who believed their parents when they told them that the puppy who had destroyed the new couch was sent away to live on a farm.