William Powers writes in the National Journal about the hard times for the weekly news magazine:
As I write this column, two magazines, Newsweek and Time, sit at my elbow. Each is the current issue, dated April 23.
Each devotes its cover and many inside pages to a story that, as it went to press, was seemingly the only thing that mattered in America, the fall of Don Imus.
Each intelligently pores over that story, discovering Several Larger Truths about our culture…
And each feels pointless, expired, like an ancient scroll found in a cave.
Try transporting yourself back to the time of Imus.
Hard, isn’t it?
It was just five or six days ago, but it might as well be five months.
This Newsweek issue was hitting the stands the morning that the Blacksburg massacre happened.
If you went to the magazine’s Web site that day, you would have seen the Imus cover reduced to a postage stamp in an upper corner of the main page…
Nothing stinks like old news…
Don’t get me wrong.
We really do care about these stories for a few days, sometimes a week…
Three weeks ago, Don Imus didn’t figure at all in most people’s lives.
According to Newsweek, his radio show had 2.25 million-plus “unique” weekly listeners, which is less than the population of Minneapolis-St. Paul.
He mattered more than that, briefly, because his transgression tapped into a few larger issues that society happened to be working on.
The story itself is just an instrument, a disposable tool.
Use it quickly and move on.
The exception to this rule is the rare story that is so large on its own terms, it obliterates all other story lines — 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina being the most prominent recent examples.
Maybe the Virginia Tech massacre, an authentic national horror, is one of those stories.
Or maybe, even as you read this, the next big thing has already come along.
Like newspapers, news magazines can not survive just digesting last week’s news.
Explain and advance.
Anticipatory journalism is the new name of the game.
Tell my WHY and tell me WHAT’S NEXT.