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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged newsweek

1. October 24, 2012 06:50 AM

   Newsweek and the (relative) health of print mags

   Not all is dark for the industry

   By Ryan Chittum

   News that Newsweek is exiting print was hardly surprising coming two years after the Washington Post Company unloaded it for a dollar. But these numbers struck me while reading this Financial Times story on the news: Newsweek has suffered more than some rivals. Its 1.5m circulation is less than half what it was five years ago, and Publishers Information Bureau...

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2. December 15, 2011 03:30 PM

   Newsweek Fetishizes an “Epidemic”

   Voyeuristic sex-addiction cover misses an important debate

   By Curtis Brainard

   A “sex addiction epidemic” is unfolding like a plague in the US, according a recent Newsweek cover story—but don’t reach for the chastity belt just yet. The over-stimulated article is weakly reported, superficial, and perpetuates confusion about sexual disorders that researchers in the field have been trying to alleviate. “Sex addiction” has been a popular story since the publication of...

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3. October 18, 2012 03:48 PM

   Newsweek is dead … long live Newsweek?

   The end of its print run may not be all doom and gloom

   By Sara Morrison

   As has been reported all over the place today, Newsweek/The Daily Beast editor in chief Tina Brown and CEO Baba Shetty announced that, after 79 years, the final print version of Newsweek will hit newsstands on December 31. As of the new year, the magazine will transition to a digital-only format called Newsweek Global, available via paid subscription. To many,...

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4. March 8, 2011 02:09 PM

   Newsweek’s Redesign Gets Two Thumbs Down

   Is the harsh reaction from media critics warranted?

   By The Editors

   The newly redesigned Newsweek launched yesterday, and as soon as the first images appeared online, the issue quickly became a media-critic punching bag. “Yawn,” wrote Fox Nation. Choire Sicha had the day’s most oft-quoted put-down on The Awl: “This is going to electrify the waiting rooms of dentists all over Scarsdale.” Later in the afternoon, Jack Shafer declared of the...

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5. October 4, 2012 06:50 AM

   Newsweek’s latest blunder

   "Transcription error" mars special commemorative issue

   By Sara Morrison

   It seems like only yesterday that we were paying tribute to Newsweek with our July/August magazine cover. Alas, in the few months since then, the weekly has been the center of numerous mistakes and missteps. In August: that recycled sexy asparagus cover and the "Niall Ferguson debacle," a cover story so riddled with factual errors that Paul Krugman called it...

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6. August 21, 2012 11:00 AM

   Newsweek’s Niall Ferguson debacle

   A misleading cover story gets the wrong kind of buzz for Tina Brown's mag

   By Ryan Chittum

   It's been a long time since I've seen a cover story so comprehensively demolished as Newsweek's disengenuous anti-Obama piece by Harvard's Niall Ferguson, who puts together a greatest-hits compilation of the right's economic smears of the past three-plus years. As I write this, Niall Ferguson's Newsweek cover piece on why Obama's presidency has failed has racked up 13,351 comments, 6,130...

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7. August 22, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: Newsweek standards, Luddite fallacy, crowdfunding scams

   Everyone but the magazine fact checks Niall Ferguson

   By Ryan Chittum

   Paul Krugman asks: We know what Ferguson is going to do: he’s going to brazen it out, actually boasting about the deftness with which he misled his readers. But what is Newsweek going to do? Not much, apparently. Dylan Byers of Politico talks to Newsweek about its fact-checking process amidst the demolition of Niall Ferguson's cover story: "We, like other...

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8. August 24, 2012 01:55 AM

   Audit Notes: Gawker’s Bain scoop, file sharing and record sales, Niall Ferguson

   A document dump raises questions about tax strategies

   By Ryan Chittum

   Gawker's John Cook got hold of 950 pages of confidential Bain Capital documents related to Mitt Romney and put them online, writing that, "The documents are exceedingly complicated. We don't pretend to be qualified to decode them in full, which is why we are posting them here for readers to help evaluate—please leave your thoughts in the discussion below." The...

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9. November 29, 2010 04:10 PM

   Corporate Welfare Rocks!

   The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek give Utah the puff treatment

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal reports that government activism is good... when it benefits Big Business. It's a puff piece about how Utah's corporate-welfare policies are boosting its economy. Here's the headline: Incentives Spur Utah's Growth State's Red-Carpet Treatment Toward Businesses Is a Catalyst for Job Gains Here's the top: The recent recession knocked business-friendly Utah off its perch as a...

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10. September 27, 2012 03:38 PM

    Journalistic firebombs in the Middle East

    Is our job to inform or inflame?

    By Lawrence Pintak

    The pen is mightier than the sword, but it is also far more lethal when manipulated irresponsibly. Consider Charb. There is a ridiculous photo circulating on the web showing the editor of Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly), the French satirical magazine. He goes by the name Charb, and in one hand he holds a copy of this week’s issue, containing lewd...

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11. April 16, 2012 02:53 PM

    Katie Roiphe’s Click Bait Win is a Discourse Fail

    The inflammatory essayist angers the feminist twitterverse but doesn't add any value to public discourse

    By Kira Goldenberg

    Among the clusters of folks I follow on Twitter—media critics, yoga bloggers, friends—the group that’s consistently most entertaining is the feminist journalists (sorry, friends). One of my favorite Internet things is their reaction to any public assertion that can be construed as anti-woman. The feminist journos commence intelligently snarking the original comment until they overtake the original narrative (disclosure: I...

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12. July 30, 2012 12:52 PM

    Noticed: #countriesbyvoguewriters

    Twitter users lampoon a line by former Vogue writer Joan Juliet Buck

    By Kira Goldenberg

    This morning, Newsweek posted a story by Joan Juliet Buck which tells the backstory to her Vogue profile of Syrian First Lady Asma al-Assad. Titled “A Rose in the Desert,” the profile ran in the March 2011 issue, hitting newsstands right as the Syrian government began killing its own citizens, a borderline civil war that continues there. Vogue eventually pulled...

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13. August 15, 2012 06:51 AM

    The media’s Internet infatuation

    Much of the coverage makes claims "that are grand, outlandish, and ultimately unverifiable"

    By Michael Massing

    The New York Times finds the Internet, and the business and culture surrounding it, endlessly fascinating. When Marissa Mayer was named CEO of Yahoo last month, the paper devoted more than a dozen pieces to the event, pondering everything from the ramifications of her pregnancy to the depth of the challenges she faces. “Does Facebook Turn People Into Narcissists?” Tara...

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14. September 17, 2012 04:11 PM

    The wrong kind of attention

    Newsweek's focus on provocative covers isn't a solid digital-age strategy

    By Kira Goldenberg

    Talking about the relevance of magazine cover images feels comparable to mentioning that a newspaper story was “above the fold”—both are print media conventions with little significance in an age when most folks consume media digitally. And yet, week after week, Newsweek’s cover manages to enter the conversation, mostly as a focal point for criticism among media watchers and on...

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15. May 9, 2011 12:13 PM

    Tina, Tina Everywhere

    By Joel Meares

    Peter Stevenson’s 5,000-word New York Times magazine profile of wunderkind “editrix” Tina Brown is a well-written, well-reported, breezy-enough read. It’s notable mostly for painting Brown with a very light touch—her oft-derided time at The New Yorker’s helm is glossed over (“Brown’s willingness to publish glitzy, less-than-stellar articles galled traditionalists…”)—as well as for its thumbs-up assessment of her new Newsweek (“early...

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16. June 28, 2011 10:34 AM

    Weekend at Di’s

    By Joel Meares

    Somebody dial 911. Quickly. There’s been a gas leak at the Newsbeast offices. There must have been. It is the only explanation for this: And this: the article I still refuse to believe is inside, penned by a clearly propane-peaking Tina Brown. There is no doubt she would have kept her chin taut with strategic Botox shots and her...

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17. November 16, 2010 12:29 PM

    Whither NewsBeast?

    What do you think of the Daily Beast/Newsweek merge?

    By The Editors

    News of the merger deal between IAC’s The Daily Beast and Sidney Harman’s Newsweek lit up the Internet last Friday. Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that, according to the new company’s CEO, Stephen Colvin, Newsweek.com as a separate web domain would cease to exist, its content to be folded into the Beast site. Newsweek.com staffers took to...

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