Newsweek's Last News

(Reuters) - The FBI is investigating a hack into U.S. magazine Newsweek's Twitter account that resulted in posted threats against the Obama family, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Tuesday.

Poor Reuters.  They still insist on calling Newsweek a magazine. Factually, Newsweek is no longer a periodical in any conventional sense. It’s even stopped being a credible website, twice now. A more accurate headline might be: FBI investigates threats over Twitter handle cyber squatted by a religious cult.

OK, not quite pithy enough. My point here is that something oddball happening on a Twitter feed owned by a foreign religious cult shouldn’t be news.  It would be news if something normal appeared on Newsweek’s feed.

I thought I had written my last piece on Newsweek some time ago. Not to set fabled Reuters straight, but Newsweek is no longer owned in the U.S. It is today a subsidiary of a cult run out of Korea. Technically it shares offices with International Business Times. This aggregation website has strong ties to Olivet University. All of these various institutions are wholly backed by love offerings sent in the direction of minister David J. Jang.  For Wonderblog bonus points, Jang is an end of the world guru of the Herbert W. Armstrong stripe, although he’s actually a Moonie.

What a long, strange trip it’s been. Apparently Reuters missed it. Tellingly, almost no other news source picked up on Newsweek’s little hack. This could be because the rest of the world declared what was left of Newsweek’s reputation DOA RIP right after its last printed issue, a masterpiece of BIG LIE NEWSFICTION declaring that they had uncovered the mastermind behind Bitcoin. Since then, Newsweek has only appeared on newsstands in neo-pulp form, as a trademark used for stand alone publications on specific sensational topics.

And since Newsweek’s descent into the abyss, nearly one third of the newsstand space has come to be cluttered with these neo pulps, sensational fact paperbacks in magazine form.  It might be the hottest trend in publishing right now.* Hot or not, the trend has gone unnoticed in the media.

It should be noted that Reuters itself is in the business of selling subscriptions to news outlets for its various transmitted tidbits. Like the Associated Press, United Press International and Dow Jones, Reuters is a vestige of the time when most news outlets relied on the telegraph (or wire services) to provide broad content. Like their primary consumers, the newspapers, the internet has made them all somewhat obsolete.

Reuters and its kin still have some brand value. Your average edition of Huffington Post is much more likely to post a feature originating on Reuters than it is from the About Us feature of the Facebook page on Nell’s House of Pet Care. And that’s as it should be. Unfortunately there is a shadow business that each of the wire services has been in since the 1920s or so—promotions. They are not quite on a par with the Yahoo News, which often posts flat out advertising as news stories, but each wire service has been known to rent its space to Publicity Agents. **

There is also some back scratching known to occur. I think that’s what might be happening here. I’m guessing that Newsweek still has a Reuter’s subscription. Thus it makes good business sense for Reuters to report anything that happens to Newsweek as news, especially if it disparages Twitter. After all, it was Twitter which destroyed the wire services’ once very lucrative Publicity Agent pimping.

By the way: who the hell still has a Twitter subscription?

(*) We do intend to do a publisher by publisher breakdown of the newest crop of neo pulp producers in a future post. Hopefully the trend will outlast the race of retailers removing magazine racks altogether.

(**) There was a time in the not too distant past when certain news outlets would rip and read nearly anything that came across on the wire services.  It was the goal of every publicity agent to have one of their client’s promotions reported as actual news. That this happened often enough was what justified the wire services’ steep fees. It was the old school way of “Going Viral”. With the decline of  chain newspapers and rise of Twitter and other services selling the same access, this business largely evaporated.

Note: I am not the suspicious type. If I was I might suspect that Newsweek staged the incident to draw attention to itself.  I honestly don’t think David J. Jang is that smart. Moreover, having his house organ news magazine bleat threats to Obama is probably something that he would rather avoid. Sometimes rank incompetence is exactly what it seems. For a detailed look at the Jang organization’s general workmanship and influence, check out either the International Business News website or Jang’s own wiki entry. These people are not masterminds.

Note: Although Hil-Gle does appreciate Newsweek’s status as a rare two-fer—a subject which strays into several of our beats—we take no delight in its current fate. We are not at all rooting on the trend of former news magazines becoming pulp magazines nor pulp magazines becoming the possessions of end of the world cult gurus.  It makes us dizzy.