Whoever is employed as Sam Gosling’s publicist, congratulations. You somehow got Newsweek to manufacture an entire article promoting your psychology professor client, his new book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, and the premise that the crap you keep in your house might say something about you as a person. Well, no crap. CONTINUED »
The new CNN show hosted by Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria will be called Fareed Zakaria — GPS, for “global public square.” Clever. [AP]
Staffers at the Washington Post Co.’s Newsweek are supposedly upset at how many celebs the Time Inc.’s Time 100 attracts. Supposedly. [P6]
Newsweek might not move to Ground Zero after all. Soho is suddenly much more appealing. [NYP]
In yesterday’s New York Times, both CollegeHumor.com, a website for retired frat guys looking to kill time at the $120,000-starting i-banker jobs, and the Onion News Network, a faux video news title, got the profile treatment. How fitting, then, that a newspaper so focused on short attention spans and inventing truths is the same newspaper that both Newsweek and the New York Post claim Mayor Michael Bloomberg is eying for a possible purchase, BECAUSE THAT MAN CAN BUY WHATEVER HE WANTS. It’s all thanks to a Michael Wolff suggestion, in Vanity Fair, that Bloomberg do just that.
The theory of a Bloomberg-owned Times has its doubters. Those that should also be on the list of disbelievers: Newsweek. CONTINUED »
Why did Jonathan Alter and Howard Fineman refuse the Newsweek buyout deals that 111 other people accepted, even when they were among the sweetest offers made in recent history?
Perhaps it’s because both of them are earning into the six figures at MSNBC with on-air analyst gigs, we understand.
Had they chose to leave Newsweek, they may have received their news magazine salary for up to two years, but they also would’ve become much less desirable commodities at MSNBC, and risked losing those lucrative contracts.
Though we’re too weak to tally the actual percentage of Newsweek’s staff that is leaving through buyout offers, some 111 of them will be gone by the end of the year. The most senior of them will collect two year’s pay as severance (just enough to float them until they can find another gig that pays them such extreme fees) and, since more staffers accepted buyouts than expected (run for the exits!), at least some of the expiring posts will be refilled — with younger, cheaper, and more easily molded minions.
Steven Levy, a 12-year veteran tech columnist at Newsweek, a magazine we never pick up, is leaving to join join Wired, a magazine we never tear from its polybag. [Romenesko]
We spent all day yesterday waiting for The New Republic’s article on the Times’s article on John McCain.
And today we spent all day waiting for the New York Times to defend itself on the article.
If it weren’t for John McCain and the New York Times, we would just be thinking of the meaningless of life. If God exists, surely he’s behind this entertaining mini-scandal.
The Times answers are exactly what you’d expect. In short, they’re happy with the piece.
• Bill Keller goes first. The basic question was “What the fuck were you thinking publishing the story?” Keller’s response: Hey, it’s a legitimate story! It’s part of our Long Series! Jack Shafer agreed! Case closed. CONTINUED »
At a recent lecture at Columbia, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham bristled at his magazine’s dental office reputation:
It’s an incredible frustration that I’ve got some of the most decent, hard-working, honest, passionate, straight-shooting, non-ideological people who just want to tell the damn truth, and how to get this past this image that we’re just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get, or something, that’s the challenge. And I just don’t know how to do it, so if you’ve got any ideas, tell me.
Look, if we knew how to improve Newsweek, we wouldn’t be working from home in our pajamas. But we can judge insightfully.
To put it simply, it comes out once a week: There’s nothing in Newsweek that’s actual news.
It’s not that weeklies are inherent failures. But successful ones, like the New Yorker, offer something that goes beyond news per se. They offer great writing or surprising stories. Even People, which is also standard dental office fare, has access to celebrities that surpasses its competitors.
Newsweek is caught in the unfortunate position of offering the same information reported the same way as daily papers that came out a week before.
Also, all those pharmaceutical ads remind people that they’re going to die, and no one wants that while waiting to see the doctor.
Newsweek, the magazine of dental offices and free trials, is thinking about moving south.
The magazine’s lease at its eponymous building on Broadway and 57th ends next year. The magazine is working on a lease at 100 Church Street, near the World Trade Center. Never forget.
Despite being in south Manhattan, that location is not hip at all. That area of Manhattan is actually worse than midtown. There are tourists and disgruntled city employees everywhere. Newsweek copy editors should fit right in.
Once a top adviser to the Bush administration, Karl Rove is now airing his agenda all by himself. He’s lined up a Fox News gig, but his column in Newsweek is proving to be a prickly platform, too. And not because he’s using it to play politics, which he is, but because he’s going after the very magazine his article appears in.
Why then the media’s recent fascination with the supposed demise of the Republican Party? What are the reasons given for why, at least when it comes to the Republicans, “the party’s over,” as NEWSWEEK recently pronounced? First, we are told the GOP nomination has not been won “fairly quickly,” as in recent contests. This is a horrible misremembering of history.
DELUXE DANA Portfolio staffs up European “bureau” with the excellent Dana Thomas from Newsweek, where the fashion and culture scribe has been for 12 years. Along with her brand name, of course, comes the ire of the luxury world elite, thanks to her Louis Vuitton-bashing book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. Just what a high-brow business glossy needs: the wrath of pissed off possible advertisers.
Richard Smith will be stepping down from his role as the most powerful man at Newsweek.
The editor-in-chief and chief executive is leaving pursue his charity work; he’ll keep his title as chairman of the magazine.
Newsweek exec Ann McDaniel will become managing director. In the role, she’ll handle the business and editorial sides of the magazine, which could get awkward if Newsweek ever runs an investigation on big Pharma. Thomas Ascheim, former G.M. of Nickelodeon Television, will replace Smith as chief executive. No new E.I.C. will be named, which makes Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, the top guy.
Word around the Newsweek office is that “he was extremely tall and knew everyone’s name” and made a lot of good toasts, which is the most you can hope for in a leader.
Paris Hilton is off to Rwanda, to, you know, give back or something. And like any heiress would be, she’s a bit nervous about leaving the manor. She tells Newsweek:
“I’m scared, yeah. I’ve heard it’s really dangerous,” she says. “I’ve never been on a trip like this before.” She says she’ll resort to eating candy bars if that’s what it takes to get her through any foreign-cuisine issues.
The idea of Paris eating candy bars is almost as unbelievable as her in Rwanda.
The profile swallows her “I’m smarter than I seem” act whole, and reports, “The biggest misconception [about Paris] is that she’s dumb.”
Maybe Newsweek needs to believe there’s something more to her to justify giving 1000 words to someone so stupid. Oh Newsweek, denial ain’t just a river Egypt.
IvyGate, the blog for smug Ivy Leaguers, has graduated. The pet project of Nick Summers of Newsweek and Chris Beam of Slate now has a staff of three writers. Summers and Beam will maintain a publishers role.
Summers was recently promoted at Newsweek from Periscope to covering the Clinton campaign for Newsweek’s special book project. Beam wrote our favorite Slate Explainer of all time.
You may remember IvyGate for destroying the life of Aleksey Vayner, a Yale student who took the Adidas slogan “Impossible is Nothing” to new levels of doucheness.
Since it is the first day of school, here’s a reminder to be happy you graduated:
• Newsweek reveals the real reason behind Bloomberg’s crusade against fast food, and its not his irrational fear of the Hamburglar.
• We take it this Staten Island resident wasn’t using Potassium Nitrate to make his pretty July 4th fireworks.
• Apparently, that Japanese guy’s lock jaw won’t stop him from sucking down Nathan’s hot dogs!
• After nearly half a century, the National Park Service cheats on the Circle Line with some whore from California.
• Lastly, check out this gift-wrapped CBS headline: “Only In New York City: Pizzeria Offers Lap Dances.” It’s almost as though they knew we were short of material!
Who better than to school Hollywood starlets – nods to Lindsay, Paris, Britney, and a long ago Nicole – on rehab than the black sheep of the Reagan political family, Patti Davis? “It makes me angry when I see how the opportunity of being in rehab can be abused as nothing more than a slick PR move,” she writes in Newsweek. “A brief retreat from the paparazzi. How lucky these celebrities are to be able to go to one of these facilities (which are not cheap) and to benefit from the wisdom and help that waits behind the gates.”
Davis, to be sure, never went to rehab. Though, she admits, “I should have. I plunged willingly, desperately, into addiction at the pliable age of 15. My poison, my love, was speed. It came in pretty colored tablets called amphetamines. Over the years it changed to capsules—some clear with orange and black granules inside, some pure black. Like the devil. Like hell.”
Except she didn’t enjoy it in places like Winston’s, Teddy’s, or the Chateau. CONTINUED »
While Newsweek is happy to jump all over Katie Couric’s most recent troubles – where her “Katie Couric’s Notebook” feature was copied from a WSJ, leaving a CBS News producer fired – the magazine is, apparently, less prepared to jump all over Don Imus for his racial flap.
That might have a little something to do with the fact that Newsweek’s pundits are regular guests on Imus’ radio show.
CONTINUED »
Editorial Director
