Time to think like a contrarian

I'm going to go out on a limb. I predict the future will be kind to publications that do not follow Newsweek Editor John Meacham's belief that “as the number of news outlets expands, it is said, attention spans shrink; only the fast and the pithy will survive.” The New York Times has a nice essay about Newsweek's makeover, but it runs under the heading of "Newsweek's Journalism of Fourth and Long," and states "The makeover represents a rethinking of what it means to be a newsweekly, but no redesign can gild the cold fact that it remains a news magazine that comes out weekly at a time when current events are produced and digested on a cycle that is measured with an egg timer, not a calendar."

I'd be foolish to disagree that current events are produced on that quick a cycle, but I don't believe they are digested that quickly, which is why I predict a brighter future for some publications that, instead of trying to out-quick the Internet, opt instead for intelligently putting the news in perspective. That, by the way, was exactly what Time and Newsweek did in their most successful years. And I'll point out that the Times essay ran in it's weekly "Week in Review" section, which also works because it puts events into perspective.

I am a news junky who reads three print newspapers daily, four more weekly, regularly scan eight on the Internet (four from outside the U.S.) daily, and read too many blogs/homepages/whatever to remember. I subscribe to five rss news feeds daily and eight discussion groups (there are probably more that I'm forgetting). My problem is that I'm getting all that "egg timer" news, and I am always seeking something to put it into perspective.

I predict somebody's going to built a highly-successful future doing just that -- and probably more than just one publication. They just have to get away from those with the attention span of a gnat who haven't read any history (or at least have forgotten all they've read) who are killing publications right and left by trying to out-quick the Internet and shirking long-form journalism. It can't be done.

The Times headline used a sports analogy, so I'll offer another, especially for basketball fans. It's like a fast break where the smart teams always have a player trailing the first ones down the court. The trailer is the one who scores when the quicker players are offset by even quicker players on defense, allowing the trailer to take the ball to the basket unmolested. You can't out-quick the Internet, but you can out-smart it.