It was a little over a year ago that Newsweek redesigned itself to look like a cross between a paper version of Slate and those “Special Advertising Supplements” that interrupt huge chunks of a magazine with advertorial content that doesn’t fool a single human being on earth into thinking it’s part of the magazine.
*gasps for breath*
I noted back then that I thought the magazine had taken a step toward obsolescence with its redesign. Here we are a year later and the magazine has a new editor and a new look. Actually, Tina Brown took over a few months back. I didn’t think the attempt to resurrect the once venerable newsweekly with a change of blood warranted another post, but I’ve seen a spike in visitors to my blog looking for discussions about the old design and I thought Might as well prod the jellyfish once again.
Tina Brown came to Newsweek by way of Talk, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and, most importantly, Tattler, the gossip magazine of the rich and famous. Along the way every thing Tina Brown touched turned to gold, or at least a shade of gold called Tina Brown because rather than updating the images of the magazines she converted them into another facet of Tina Brown. Newsweek doesn’t look new so much as it looks like a semi-hard news version of her previous magazines. Some of the spreads could be pulled and inserted into old issues of Vanity Fair and fit right in. The magazine – and every magazine she works for – should just insert her name above the title, as in Tina Brown’s Newsweek.
I get it, print media is suffering. People had dozens of places to gather the information they want in this digital age, and for a magazine to remain profitable it need to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. But for Newsweek to survive it’s going to need to deliver on the first part of its name in way it hasn’t done since a time before it saw itself in competition with People magazine: it needs to deliver the news of the week. Real news, in-depth news summaries. Remove the page of quotes out of context and give us the context. Let’s read less about famous people and more about the people who are making the news but aren’t in front of cameras for a living. Sure, clean up and modernize the design, but there are ways to make a layout breathe without making white space take up 60% of the page.
In the end, a newsweekly should be the place to go for background and details. We spend our weeks catching a bit of story here, a tease of news there. Let the newsweekly return to its roots, to give us a place that pulls all those breaking news fragments into a cohesive narrative that helps us better understand what’s been coming at us in tags and tweets. Let the internet give us the bits and pieces, let Newsweek show us the whole picture down the road when we can take a moment to digest it.
Newsweek‘s problems aren’t in the design, they’re editorial, and it’s going to take someone with a solid view of the past to bring us the future.
If the magazine lasts that long.
I’m going to have to take a closer look at the hard-copy version of Newsweek because I had been interested in its transformation — its exterior and interior “self.” You make some really interesting and important points — and touched on a couple of crucial thoughts that have been winding their way through newsrooms — investigation, exploration, analysis, the “back story” have always been print journalism’s stronger suits and i just wish that there was some way to edge closer to that model — breaking news and updates, stats and such online — and background and context and lending flesh and form to studies and statistics and the effects of legislation passed to “print” — and it’s various platforms. it’s a crazy moment of exploration right now. Have you taken a look at the NYT Sunday magazine’s recent redesign? It’s so clear that they are trying to make the page feel like a website — when really, the people reading the paper want to page to feel like, well a page…Just wondered if you’d had a chance to look at it. It reminds me of when so many daily newspapers bent over to try to mimic the like USA Today “more big graphics” model…sigh. I noticed in the newsroom, when we began talking about stories as being “content” and not “stories” that that announced the beginning of a huge culture shift…we’re definitely still in motion.
i do get and read both version of the NYT (depending on where i am and what i need in the moment) and what i saw happen with the magazine looks to me more like content integration; designing something that works in both places so they aren’t paying for design redundancies.
if i had to guess, everyone in print is doing everything they can to make the content fit the form in order to retain readerships. the new yorker (another subscription i read) works great on the ipad but i just as often want to take the magazine to the beach or a sporting event or just outside where the distraction of other wifi temptations aren’t available.
and i think with newsweek and its integration with the daily beast we might be seeing a transition away from print altogether, merging the magazine into the website and then eliminating the print form. if this is the direction headed it is a mistake, i think.
we really could use the e-ink newspaper right about now.