Another article deflating Bill Keller’s “more elevated” argument from USA Today: “For the first six months of the year, celebrity and gossip magazines such as Us Weekly posted double-digit newsstand gains while newsweeklies such as Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report saw single-copy sales dip 3.4% to 16.6%.”
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (Bat Segundo interview with Murphy)
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (Bat Segundo interview with McClear)
Except, as someone gifted with a subscription to Newsweek, I can say that it is pretty much nonsense too. It is more a weak lifestyle magazine than a news vehicle, with many many pages devoted to health, movies, and vacuous coverage of social trends (“Mom’s who quit their jobs!” etc.). Its especially sad as, as the post-election issue devoted to news coverage showed, they have some decent reporters on staff.
I’d say that these types of magazines, while courting readers who want “news about me!”, have managed to lose subscribers who like me want some FREAKING NEWS about what’s going on in the world. And that that is as much to blame for their falling ad sales as the rise in celebrity mags. If they pursued the news with half of the rabidity of a paparazzi on the tale of Jolie-Pitt, they’d be in a better place today.
That’s certainly a good point, Carrie, one that surely Keller and Company would never acknowledge. But he’s talking about single-copy sales drops, not subscriptions (and I failed to mention this in the post). Check out the stats at the end of the article. It alarms me that people are more inclined to reach out for the latest issue of In Touch than, say, the news of our time. Also note that this is over a six-month period.
Interesting, though I’d still contend that the same trend may be at work. Not to take away from the point that America is mass-consuming celebrity news, only to say that if you charted it, it’s probably more complicated. And I just reactively hate it when news organizations let themselves off, with a “it’s not us! it’s our readers!” To which I say, well maybe if you’d stop using your publication to court people who will – no matter how many peachy graphics and funny pie charts you brighten your pages with – still prefer to get their news from television, you’d get some real readers back.
Before I got gifted with my current subscription, the only time I’d pick up Newsweek was in Europe – it’s been a while but my memory is that the foreign edition of the magazine was everything I wished the American issue was, very smart, indepth articles on politics and events around the world, but not so indepth that, you know, it was like toting around a copy of Foreign Policy review or soemthing. You just felt like a moderately well informed human being at the end of reading.
I assume you saw this way back but I put it here as I thought it was brilliant, and Hank Steuver should be made Editor in Chief of the World:
http://www.observer.com/themediamob/2005/08/critique-critique-stuever-tells-off.html
OK, going to go look at those stats you mention.