What I learned from Newsweek

The news last week about Newsweek -- that the Washington Post Co. plans to put it up for sale because it can't see a profit in carrying on with it -- is sudden, grim and wholly unsurprising. As Slate's Jack Shafer put it, "The category has finally gone to mold and will, in another 30 months or 30 years, advance to putrefaction."

I worked for Newsweek for awhile right after school, and it is an experience I am very grateful for. I specifically worked in the New York office for the magazine overseas editions and partners, reporting on the details of editorial planning through the news cycle, and representing their interests and needs where necessary. I was a full-time fly-on-the-wall, and learned more about big-time media and how the whole sausage factory works than I could have anywhere else.

Back then, it still had a definite swerve, as did most mainstream media outlets. Circulation was stable, the dot-com boom was in full swing so money wasn't a problem. I didn't make a lot of money -- compared to all my friends who were making actual money at various Silicon Alley outfits. And since everyone still had dial-up connections, there was a definite sense around our office that the Internet was a problem within our power to master. Newsweek's web presence at the time was a semi-autonomous add-on, with content provided by eager young shlubs like me for a little extra money. There was a lot to be excited about.

But basically, I was at the bottom on the ladder, and you learn a lot down there. You see how people do their jobs, how they understand what they do, and most immediately, how they treat people who are at the bottom of the ladder. I saw first-hand just how howlingly pompous, glib, and shallow many high-flying media pros are. In many ways they are the ones who did irreparable damage to the news industry -- and yet oddly are rarely mentioned in any of the myriad panels, symposia, lectures, radio chat shows, or CJR features dedicated to understanding just what had happened to journalism and how it can move forward. These were the sort of people who would flatly dismiss a national desk story about a major Midwestern drought because "no one cared about that," but treated negotiations to get an exclusive feature with the five finalists of the first season of "Survivor" like it was the Pentagon Papers. (I've got plenty more stories, by the way, but I'll save them until we have a drink sometime).

On the other hand, I met a lot of people who I came to respect and admire. Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham was in that second category. He was considered a bit of a boy wonder back then, when he was the managing editor. He was smart, and quick with intelligent and apropos historical anecdotes during meetings that were met with nervous titters. He's taken a fair share of lumps in the past few days, which says a lot more about media-land than about him. If there was any sense or justice in the world, Meacham would be leading some smart American version of The Economist (and I, since we're in fantasy-land here, would be one of his loyal foot soldiers, happily toiling away knowing I'm doing important work and being fairly compensated for it. But whatever.).

Meacham's understanding of the industry always made sense to me -- and Shafer admits he "understands publishing's upheaval better than his fading magazine would indicate." I thought their redesign last year could have been a step in the right direction, but in reality turned out to be little more than a half-assed gesture in the most likely cardinal point. The problem was that they chose to rely on brand names instead of content, which is a dangerous proposition if practically-speaking that means giving a free reign to gushing founts of conventional wisdom like Howard Fineman and Fareed Zakeria.

The short leash the Post have to the experiment cuts to the quick very fast. It is hard to believe that the idea of a newsweekly is really dead, but as Dan Kennedy put it in all its plain, simple truth, it really isn't. Newsweek just failed, while Time, The Economist, and The Week didn't. "Newsweek and U.S. News were not done in by cable TV and blogs," he wrote. "They were done in by leaner, smarter competitors who had a better idea of what a weekly news magazine should be."

The slow demise of this institution has been a steady topic of conversation among the media chattering classes, and the observations of one very small, temporary cog in it usually don't matter beyond that single cog. Although, many have had formative professional experiences in the trenches of these behemoths. Hunter S. Thompson, in his youth, was a copy boy at Time for a year or so when he was young. It was enough to frighten him into thinking about new and better ways to tell stories than the early industrial grind of the newsmagazine of record. (Update, 5/11: Alex Beam of the Boston Globe, another former Newsweek cog, has a much more candid assessment of his time there than I can muster at the moment.)

What lesson did I learn? The most immediate was I came to recognize that as much as I liked that second category of serious journalists, I was so creeped out by the first batch of media creatures that I got a powerful fugue-like sense that I had to leave New York -- at least for a little while -- or lose an important part of my soul. I could see that climbing that particular ladder came at the price of a certain emptiness -- the drudge of moving from assistant editor to associate editor, the sense that your professional life is a big high school cafeteria, and the stubborn insistence that Manhattan is the universe, and not just an island. So I decided to see the world on my own careful and cautious terms. So I made a parallel leap into another self-absorbed fish-pond (Washington, which is a whole other story).

But I never realized that those first few doubts would never go away. I'm grateful to Shafer for trying to put a positive spin on it, when he exhorts readers to cheer up: "There isn't a minute that something new and wonderful isn't being born." Yeah?