The New Tina Brown Newsweek: More Week, Less News?

Lord knows (or at least regular readers of this blog know), I'm a big supporter of Tina Brown's takeover of Newsweek. As I've written elsewhere, if anyone can make a go of Newsweek, which has lurched from problem to salvation to problem over the past decade, it's Tina Brown, who knows print and online, clearly believes in both, and has been successful at both (with the exception of Talk, of course).

So, note the Tina Brownification of the cover, which was revealed this past week:

• There's nothing newsweekly (or Newsweekly, either) about the cover text, by which I mean it suggests feature articles, not weekly news reports. All of the cover-blurbed articles look like they could appear on the cover of Vogue or The Atlantic or Vanity Fair. Considering the moribund state of newsweeklies, that's probably a good move.
• No fewer than four article authors are listed on the cover. Tina Brown is known for using star writers to sell her publications. She's been criticized for being somewhat ruthless in her use of them and then disposal of them when they no longer deliver, but I don't think you can claim that she doesn't know what she's doing. 
• Keep the logo, which is good. No need to scare the loyal Newsweek readers.
• Celebrity. On the cover. Sells magazines.

This new issue reportedly goes on sale today, so I haven't yet picked up a copy. But I will, because I am interested in what else has been changed in this new Tina Brown era. One of its biggest tests will be if it draws in the advertising; the magazine had become very anemic in ads and total page count.

So, Ms. Brown: We await the rollout.

Samir Husni on Old and New Newsweek

Husni, aka "Mr. Magazine," gives some interesting perspective to the newly redesigned Newsweek magazine. In his blog, he compares the redesigned magazine with the original magazine back in 1933, noting similarities in sections, treatment of news, and other things.

BTW, his blog is a great source of expert opinions on the periodicals business. He's the very respected chair of the University of Mississippi's Journalism Department.

The New Newsweek

The redesigned (and redefined?) Newsweek magazine debuted this week, and there are many welcome developments in it.

No longer a Time clone, the revamped magazine also avoids making the mistake of being an Economist clone. That had been one of my big worries when I heard that the magazine was going for a smaller audience and refocusing on being a thought leader, like The Economist. We've already got an Economist; we don't need two of them. Newsweek's traditional strength is as a trusted new source with high standards that gets the inside story. I think they've built on that strength in the redesign, for the most part.

There are a lot of columns -- a bit of overkill, in my opinion, but not fatal. (Let's not bicker about whether "overkill" isn't inherently "fatal," okay?) There are the expected voices of Fareed Zakaria (the man who's single-handedly dedicated to calmly reminding Americans that the rest of the world exists and that it's okay) and George Will (the man who's single-handedly dyspeptic). There's also a religion column that features public relations specialists telling the pope how to improve his street cred; it's a weak article that misses the point of organized religion, as does most religion reporting (and no, I'm not Catholic). More interesting to me was, opposite the religion column, a full-page advertisement from the United Methodist Church. That raises the important question: The Methodist Church has money?

I could have done without four pages devoted to inane chatter with American Idol contestants. Leave that to People or In Touch Weekly. But more welcome (and more useful and important) are a lengthy article on futurist Ray Kurtweil, a profile of a man with Asperger syndrome, and a report on an African warlord. Add to that the expected newsweekly content (a report on George W. Bush returning home after leaving office, an interview with President Barack Obama, in which we learn that he can do the Vulcan hand salute), and you get a magazine worth reading while you put your feet up and dig in.

The editors and publishers of Newsweek have understood the most important thing about revamping a magazine for the internet age: A print publication needs to be wordy; designed for readers, not lookers; provide in-depth material that people are unlikely to read online; be high-value, not cheapened low-value.

I used to do weekly counts on this blog of the numbers of pages in Time, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, and Focus, as a way of noting how few pages and how little substantive content American news magazines were delivering, compared to the thick and substantive German newsweeklies. The new Newsweek doesn't come in at a table-thumping 170-something pages, like Der Spiegel (which is actually a relatively thin issue of Der Spiegel), but at 96 pages (including covers), the May 25, 2009, Newsweek is worth a look.