Author: andrewcareaga

Former higher ed PR and marketing guy at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) now focused on freelance writing and editing and creative writing, fiction and non-fiction.

The end of Newsweek: A turning point for magazines?

A collection of recent Newsweeks, which sit, unread, on my desk.

Today’s announcement by The Newsweek Daily Beast Co. (yes, that is the company’s real, official name) that it is ceasing publication of the once-venerable newsmagazine Newsweek probably comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to the recent history of that magazine. When Newsweek was acquired by The Daily Beast in 2010, the publication was already struggling. Then Fareed Zakaria, who was probably Newsweek‘s biggest franchise, jumped ship to join TIME magazine. Editor-in-chief Tina Brown “seemed to continually push the Newsweek half of Newsweek/Daily Beast to the back burner—when she wasn’t cooking up desperate, attention-seeking covers,” writes Dashiell Bennett in The Atlantic Wire’s coverage of today’s announcement. Brown’s sensationalism is something I mentioned in a recent blog post about Newsweek‘s coverage of the state of higher education.

So now, Brown and company are transmogrifying their publication into an all-digital something-or-other to be called Newsweek Global. Writes The Newsweek Daily Beast Co.’s CEO Baba Shetty, the “single, worldwide edition” will be “targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context. Newsweek Global will be supported by paid subscription and will be available through e-readers for both tablet and the Web, with select content available on The Daily Beast.”

The demise of the print version of Newsweek was inevitable, I suppose. As Slate’s Matthew Yglesias points out, a weekly newsmagazine is no longer relevant in today’s always-on digital world.

In the era of print newspapers and nightly TV news, newsweeklies provided the extremely valuable function of timely up-to-date coverage of news and culture that didn’t rely on you literally checking the same news source every single day. The Internet in some ways exacerbates the dysfunctionalities of the daily news cycle by promoting relentless over-hyping of everything that occurs, but Google makes it trivially simple to just find a news story from Monday if you’re interest in reading about it on Thursday. There’s no need for a digest format and if you do great original reporting you want to publish that reporting as soon as possible not sit on it for two days to wait for a magazine distribution process.

I’m going to miss my print version of Newsweek. But Yglesias is right. It’s no longer relevant. The last two issues have been lingering on my “to read” pile for days, untouched. The commentary is really the only thing worth reading anymore, but after Zakaria left and they brought in Niall Ferguson, the quality has slipped, in my opinion.

Anyway, the folding of Newsweek may signal a turning point for the magazine industry. Or perhaps it’s just the latest chapter in the decline of print, precipitated by the Internet. General-interest media are losing ground to special-interest media, and that trend will likely continue.

Maybe this new Newsweek Global will thrive and set a shining example for higher ed to follow. All-digital alumni magazines, anyone?

Like a boss

Image via fashionablygeek.com

Today is National Boss’s Day, and if you’re like me, you think of it as just another conspiracy by the greeting card, floral delivery, and bagel and cookie industries to get our hard-earned money.

(I say this even though I’m very grateful for the carry-in luncheon my colleagues in the S&T communications department threw in my and my assistant director’s honor on Monday. Thanks, guys! It was a great treat and totally unnecessary, but appreciated!)

But even if National Boss’s Day is a corporate conspiracy, maybe there’s some value in recognizing — and thanking — the bosses in our lives. After all, if we are fortunate enough to hold down jobs in this economy, we either are bosses or have bosses, and the people who are bosses always have bosses of their own. And with employees everywhere being asked to do more, many of us are essentially our own bosses most of the time.

So, whether we like it or not, we are like a boss.

So maybe we should like a boss — as in, show some appreciation for their efforts or at least sympathy for their plight.

When it comes to bosses, I tend to agree with Bob Sutton, the author of Good Boss, Bad Boss, who says that most bosses have good intentions and want to do a good job. (There are, of course, exceptions, and we’ve all encountered them. Sutton also wrote about them in his book The No Asshole Rule.) As Sutton writes on his blog, “[M]ost bosses I know work extremely hard and are dedicated to improving their skills” and are “concerned about becoming better at practicing their difficult craft.” While writing Good Boss, Bad Boss, Sutton worried about the plight of supervisors and “how hard it is to be a good boss — the job is never done, it is amazingly easy to screw-up, and wielding power over others makes it all even harder because you are being watched so closely (and are prone to tuning-out your followers — the other half of the toxic tandem).”

“Yet, despite all these hurdles, the best evidence shows that many, if not most, people find their bosses to be competent and compassionate.”

So, whether you are a boss, report to a boss, act in both capacities, or work as your own boss, here are some tips from around the web that can help you be more like a boss, and perhaps even help you like a boss. And if you’re like me and aspire to be a competent and compassionate boss, perhaps these tips will help you on your journey.

(By the way, if you’re in to reading business books, I highly recommend Good Boss, Bad Boss. It mad the list of my favorite books of 2010.)