Yesterday’s blog dissected Time magazine; today’s examines Newsweek, since I purchased both during my travels home from NYC. I hadn’t meant to make a case study; but, after reading both magazines front to back I feel compelled.
These two magazines were regular weekly reading for me back in the day. I’d subscribe to one, then the other (never having enough money back then to get both at the same time), and spend quiet time reading every page. It took an evening or two.
No longer.
I read both magazines in the space of one hour’s waiting in an airport and another hour inflight. It didn’t require speed reading either. It didn’t even require one hundred percent of my attention.
That said, I found this week’s Newsweek with Sarah Palin on the cover to be more like the Newsweek of old. There were still cogent articles to be found, still commentaries to consider, still fluffy stuff so that readership could be as broad as possible. But the fluffy didn’t outweigh the huffy. I didn’t bother to count how many pages of content there were vs. pages of advertisement; but I believe the content column would have won. After all, if the ads had been as intrusive as they were in Time I would have felt compelled to count them. Instead, I turned page after page and felt the feeling of recognition, that I’d seen this format before.
So in the battle between Time and Newsweek, I give Time three editor’s marks and Newsweek four.
Leave a Reply