Reinventing Ourselves Poem by gershon hepner

Like newspapers becoming obsolete,
we have to reinvent ourselves, or ebb
away like time and tide, and try to beat
the odds by weaving for ourselves a web.

Inspired by an article by David Carr on the reinvention of Newsweek by its editor John Meacham (“Journalism of Fourth and Long, ” May 24,2009) :
Newsweek, the 76-year-old prism on the news of the week, was redesigned last week with significant fanfare. 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. Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, described the problem nicely. “As the number of news outlets expands, it is said, attention spans shrink; only the fast and the pithy will survive, ” he wrote in an editor’s note about a redesign of the magazine — but it was one that heralded the last redesign in October 2007. The fact that another redo is at hand in less than two years suggests that there is not a design concept in the world that will serve as a firewall against broader changes in reading and advertising habits. In the context of contemporary publishing economics, the redesign of a large, general-interest magazine is a bit of a “deck chairs” moment — no matter how much you fluff the topside of the boat, the hull is going to continue to fill with water. Although Time magazine, Newsweek’s sibling in the category, has done its share of makeovers, there is something anachronistic and ill fated about putting so much time and effort into primping the print product when the readers have spoken, loudly, that they prefer to access news on the Web. (The Newsweek Web site came in for retooling as well, but much of the fanfare and most of the energy was focused on the print product.)


5/24/09