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into the newsweeklies
This is a print war. Hold that healing yoga feature.
By Jeff Bercovici
Ever since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. news media have operated under the assumption that the subject of international events holds roughly the same level of interest for most Americans as, say, nonlinear algebra.
Nowhere has this shift been more apparent than in the newsweeklies--a term that some would say has grown less apt with each passing year.
A casual reader of Time, Newsweek or U.S. News & World Report could be forgiven for considering himself well-informed while knowing more about the health benefits of yoga or the growing popularity of Christian rock than about who's massacring whom in Sierra Leone or East Timor.
That abruptly ceased to be the case on the morning of Sept. 11.
Now, as Americans teach themselves to pronounce "Al-Qaida" and to find Kandahar on a map, officials in charge of the nation’s newsmagazines find themselves reevaluating the trajectory they've been on.
Nobody knows how the "war on terrorism" will play out, but editors and executives say they expect interest in the subject will remain high long after the onset of hostilities in Afghanistan.
Moreover, they make the case that the nature of this war will be such that many people will find themselves turning once again to print as their primary source of information.
"Americans pay attention to foreign affairs when they think the national interest is at stake," says Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek.
"Now that we've had the most definite attack that we’ve ever had in any kind of war on our soil, people realize that understanding the war on terror, and understanding other issues around the world, is in our national interest."
Taylor Gray, marketing director of Time, says he believes the effect will endure well after the shock of the attacks has worn off.
"What this lesson has taught us is that we need to understand these countries better," says Gray. "We've gone through long periods of thinking that they didn't matter to our day-to-day lives--that what was going on in Africa or Bosnia didn't really affect us.
"Now that it's landed on our doorstep, so to speak, I think there will be a big understanding that we need to know what's going on in the rest of the world."
"In a once-and-for-all way it changes the assumption that you can shut doors and keep the world outside," says Bill Emmott, editor of The Economist.
Unlike the big American newsmagazines, The Economist devotes a majority of its coverage every week to international political and business news.
Emmott says his magazine, which has a North American circulation of about 350,000, has benefited in recent years as its competitors have redirected emphasis from news to more feature-driven lifestyle coverage. He now expects at least a partial reversal of that trend.
"I suspect they will not have stories about health care and angels on the cover anytime soon," says Emmott.
Justin Smith, general manager of The Week, agrees.
"Clearly, international coverage in the U.S. press has been on a terminal decline," says Smith, whose magazine is a weekly digest of reports from other news media outlets.
"The newsweeklies collectively went into broad cultural or social reporting, probably in search of younger readers. My sense is they're certainly going to revisit that editorial direction very urgently."
Time's Gray says there is some truth to this, at least in the short term.
"To a degree, readers right now don't want to read about pop culture, so we're not going to force it down their throats."
But at least one newsweekly editor says he doesn't think journalism will be radically affected by the events of Sept. 11.
"I'm not one of those people who want to overstate that the world has so totally changed," says Brian Kelly, managing editor of U.S. News & World Report. "I think a lot of the more fluffy stories, the more trivial or entertaining stories, probably seem wrong right now, the wrong tone.
"But my sense is that after this incident more things than not will return to the way they were. If you take the rest of the world beyond South Asia, I think people's interest level won't be too different than it was before. Americans have tended to be pretty insular, and much of that will continue."
One thing that Kelly is in agreement with his colleagues about is that newsmagazines will have a special and very prominent place in coverage of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Part of that, he says, comes from the ability of weekly magazines to act as filters on a story that is breaking across four continents, with major implications for foreign and domestic policy, business and travel.
"The thing we can do is to sort it out for people and make sense of it. The New York Times is doing a wonderful job on a day-to-day basis, but I defy you to read one full day of New York Times coverage and still do your job."
Though CNN produced what was arguably the definitive coverage of the Gulf War, the ruggedness of Afghanistan, covert nature of the military operations and complexity of the conflict all make it a difficult one for TV to do a good job with, says Humphry Rolleston, marketing director for The Economist.
"With television, to actually make it compelling you need pictures," says Rolleston. "There won't be many pictures this time, just lots of stock footage of aircraft carriers. This story requires a lot of the deep thinking that television is not necessarily very good at."
October 9, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
