Newsweek, for all its profligacy, was profitable as recently as 2006. But it’s easy to look back from a deathbed and point to early signs of decrepitude. She has a point - much of the grandeur had probably turned to flab. ‘It was like that wreck of the Titanic in the James Cameron film - they’re swimming through the rooms, and you see the chandeliers.’ ‘When I looked at the document of sale, it was like the vestiges of the great galleon it had been,’ Tina Brown, Newsweek’s latest and last editor, told New York magazine last month. When Lally Weymouth, daughter of the late proprietress Katherine Graham, came to Moscow to interview the prime minister it was like a royal visit - an air-conditioned limo was hired, Russian grandees invited to a gala dinner at her hotel. When I joined the Moscow bureau in 1995 we had two correspondents, six apartments, two drivers, a photo editor, an office manager, two translators and an archivist. Newsweek was certainly a grand operation.
Trump’s second act: he can still win, in spite of everything Or Christopher Dickey, who scooped the world with the first interview with the maid at the centre of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair. Or Mike Isikoff, who uncovered the story of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky (though it was held at the last moment by nervous Newsweek editors). Journalistic legends like Behr, author of surely the best-named journalistic memoir ever written, Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? (a real quote from a BBC reporter in Congo). That took massive reportorial firepower, and correspondents with enough clout to get El Jefe on the phone at his private residence at 2 a.m., or buttonhole the secretary of state as he hurried out of a meeting. He loved what he called ‘scrambling the jets’ - mobilising Newsweek’s 30 bureaus around the world to swarm a late-breaking story and have the hell reported out of it by the time the magazine came out on Monday morning. Maynard Parker, once the doyen of Saigon’s Cercle Sportif and my first boss at Newsweek, was the last of the great boots-on-the-brass-rail editors. It showed mainstream America the reality of failure in Vietnam years before it became a political commonplace.ĭeep reporting with a cast of thousands was Newsweek’s trademark. In 1967 Newsweek published ‘Thanksgiving at Dak To’, a powerful report by Edward Behr with a photo-essay by Brice Allen which showed piles of American corpses in the carnage of Hill 875. It was a brilliant example of the kind of show-don’t-tell journalism that American newsweeklies used to do so well - a powerful indictment of segregation, told in people’s own words without polemic. In 1963, a year before Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act, it dispatched 40 researchers to conduct 1,250 interviews for a special issue titled ‘The Negro in America’. It was controversial, liberal, usually half a step ahead of Middle America. In its heyday Newsweek was an essential part of America’s national conversation. Its demise is all the more resonant because it was one side of one of the great twin peaks of the press: Time and Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Times and the Daily Telegraph. Many newspapers and magazines have folded as advertising shrinks and readers go online but Newsweek is perhaps the first of the titans to fall. After 79 years - 15 of them as my employer - the venerable old rag is to disappear into an uncertain, web-only future. So farewell then, Newsweek magazine, which published its last print issue this week.
0 kommentar(er)
