How Newsweek Got My $6.95 and Lost My Subscription

A few days ago my lovely husband came home from the market with a copy of Newsweek magazine that he knew I’d like. The cover was a photograph of a young  Michael  Jackson. It was a tribute edition to the singer with only the words “The Meaning of Michael.”

I had a delicious vision in my head of  leisurely reading the magazine on my back porch, cold drink in hand on a warm summer’s night. And I sat down to do just that last night. And then I realized that I had been scammed.

See, we’re regular subscribers to Newsweek, have been for a long time. After flipping through a few pages I realized that I was reading the exact same issue I had just read a few days. The only difference was that the issue we received in the mail had a picture of books on the cover for a story about the books that we read and what they say about us.

I flipped to the front of the magazine to find this statement from the editor, Jon Meacham:

“There is one cover, Jackson, for the newsstand, and another, about books, for our subscribers, a solution we think helps make us part of the current conversation in the marketplace and gives our committed readers a broader-guaged cover with the same content inside.”

I was stunned and had to read that sentence that ended with “wiht the same content inside” three times to believe what I was reading. How is producing two covers with the same content providing greater value to the reading public? More importantly, how is tricking Newsweek fans (which is how I felt, tricked, swindled, baited and switched) into thinking there was a special edition just on Michael Jackson on the newsstands helping the magazine better connect with their readers? And, why am I, a person focused on using social media for social change, reporting this saga to you?

I am relaying this story because it is yet another example, a particularly egregious one, of the tone-deafness of the mainstream media in the Connected Age and their complete inability to imagine a different relationship with their readers. Because that is the true power of social media, it changes the relationship between istitutions and individuals and enables us, the reader, to develop a stronger relationship with the people behind the magazine. But, only if they want to, only if they let us in and stop hiding behind logos and multiple covers!

There are lessons here for all organizations. The main lesson, the one Newsweek and many other publications don’t seem to get (no matter how often I say it, if they just listened to me or better Jay Rosen a little more . ..) is that the relationship between the publication and the reader has changed.

In the old paradigm the publication talked at us and we didn’t have many other choices but to buy what they were selling. Now we have lots and lots of choices and I’m only going to stick with particular organizations and publications that treats me well. What does “treats me well” mean? Well, for starters, how about not snookering me into buying an expensive extra newsstand copy of the magazine? And how about inviting me into conversations and treating me like a thinking member of a community not a walking wallet. I’m really tired of publications thinking that their entire social media “strategy” consists of additional content online that wasn’t good enough to go into the issue. Or reporters reluctantly blogging but not really participating in the conversation through the comments.

Enough! We have brains and interests and we used to have institutional loyalty to magazines like Newsweek, and still could, if they treated us like people, respect our relationship and strengthen it. Let us suggest stories, and crowdsource content and have real conversations with reporters, and many other things that I’m not creative enough to think of but the crowd certainly could.

So, Newsweek, you win this round, here ya go, take my $6.95. But you lost the war, we won’t be renewing our subscription.

How Newspapers Can Stop Being Stupid

Please don’t let the title of this post give you the impression that I disdain newspapers or journalists.  The journalists that I know are amazingly smart sponges of information and very diligent in their pursuit of interesting and informative stories. And the papers and magazines that they work for are trying to inform their readership — and stay in business largely through advertising. But no one, no person or institution, makes good decisions in a panic. And the panicked cacophony is creating an echo chamber of desperation out of which nothing good will come.

The blogosphere (and Twitter-sphere) are divided into two camps: the “woe’s us” camp, and the “something interesting is happening here” camp.

Of course, the woes us are in a greater panic and are therefore shouting louder. Open up a paper and read about the apocalypse:

1. The Times Arts section today devotes considerable real-estate in the print edition eulogizing the demise of the The Washington Post’s pull-out Sunday book review section. The book review section began in 1967, was folded into the Style section in 1973 (presumably because of a lack of advertising), reformulated as a stand-alone in the 1980s, and folded back in again today because of a lack of advertising.

I have three problems with this article: 1) if a critical mass of people aren’t reading this section (which we know because advertisers follow eye balls very carefully, and 2) the section isn’t actually going away, it’s going online and largely staying on land as well, then, 3) then why are we spending so much time eulogizing it except to stoke the woe’s us crowd?

A second woe’s us article was in the New Yorker today (brought to my attention by Jay Rosen, thx) by Steve Coll. Steve picks up on the Times op-ed yesterday about endowing newspapers that I dismissed here. The most telling sentence in this post is this sentence that follows a clear-eyed assessment of the benefits of online journalism followed by this sentence:

Still, there is just no substitute for the professional, civil-service-style, relentless independent thinking, reporting, and observation that developed in big newsrooms between the Second World War and whenever it was that the end began—about 2005 or so. And those qualities arose from the scale of those newsrooms, and the way the quasi-monopoly business model and high-quality family owners shielded them from political or commercial pressure—not perfectly, but largely.

Change is hard and difficult, but as someone once told me often times the thing we fear most has already happened. The clickety-clack newspaper offices filled with fedora wearing, ink-stained, “real” reporters is as long gone as Joe DiMaggio. The difficulty with the woe’s us approach is that it gets stuck in old, fundamental assumptions that are no longer true, if they ever were.  In this case they include:

• The presumption is that the only real journalism is the one that happens in newsrooms;
• That there ever reall was a firewall between reporters and commercial and political interests;
• The news that is posted online is by definition of a lesser quality than that printed on smudgy paper. Perhaps more than any other assumption I read, this is the most confounding to me. That simply putting news article online they will automatically, by definition, be of lesser quality than what was in print. I don’t know what this assumption is based on other than simply fear of change;
• The dismissal of amazing reporting done by individuals, you can call them citizen journalists, or just individuals who saw something and reported it, in places like Tibet, Kenya, New Orleans and on the campaign trial in lieu of or in combination with paid journalists;
• Oh, and  just because I can’t quite let it go because it really is stupid, one last comment on the endowment model proposed yesterday that Coll romantically embraces in his post. If anyone thinks that big donors will give money and walk away with no strings attached they should talk to universities and museums!

But if you listen carefully, you can hear and see interesting ideas beginning to bubble up.  Here is a very thoughtful post by Dorian Benkoil on various ways to approach the problem. Another interesting idea was posted today by Leonard Witt of to create a “community trust” for the Times like the Green Bay Packers whereby readers would invest, say, $400 each to become shareholders in the company. This would create an endowment to support the annual operations.

It’s certainly a better idea than a philanthropic endowment, but it stops short of fundamentally changing the relationship between newspapers and readers that is necessary to make them sustainable. We have so much more to offer than our small checkbooks. Why can’t newspapers:

1. Involve us in helping them to problem solve. Why not have community forums at local libraries and online to ask us to crowdsource  the problem and come up with new solutions?

2. Enlist readers as critics? Do we really need to read what one person has to say about movies, local restaurants and books? Why not enlist readers as critics who can create their own reputation systems online?

3. Partner with local bloggers to share their content? Does it really take a professional journalist to cover school board meetings? Newspapers have held citizen journalists at a distance and in disdain to their own detriment. This is not a zero-sum game, there is room for both and more citizens should be encouraged to take up a local “beat”.

I’d love to hear other suggestions of ways for newspapers and readers to become partners in a new hybrid entity.

Citizen Journalism Explained in 26 Seconds

Actually, i’ts more like 20 seconds. It takes someone really, really smart like Jay Rosen to explain something complicated in a crystal clear way in 20 seconds. Here ’tis:

The Real Social Filter

I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel last week with an incredibly smart and interesting panel; “Jay Rosen”:http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/, a leading media critic, Baratunde Thurston the web editor of The Onion, and Andrew Rasiej,the founder of Personal Democracy Forum. Our panel, The Forum on Participation and Politics Online, and was organized by Susan Crawford , the founder of One Web Day in honor New York City Internet Week.

These panelists were so impressive, they really do represent the pioneers of online activism, in Andrew’s case by creating opportunities for collective learning and lessons for using social media for political change, Jay is an incredible blogger about the ways that media coverage of politics and government are changing and influencing how we can change these areas; and Bartunde is a performer and blogger who uses a variety of media to convey his message of the need for systems change in politics and government.

The part of the converation that I enjoyed the most was the incredible moment of clarity that the panelists brought to a question I hear so often, “How am I supposed to know what to believe online?” This issue resonants particularly true for young people who get so much of their news online, it can be hard to discern truth from fiction sometimes. A few months ago I usually give a long winded answer about the wisdom of the crowd eventually enabling the truth to separate from the falsehoods online — it never really feels satisfying. But, Jay had a brilliant answer, here’s what he said: “This is what good bloggers do, they filter the news and information on other websites and blogs for you and bring it together on one site.”

Oh, now that makes good sense, doesn’t it? It was widely reported in outlets like the New York Times a few months ago that young people primarily get their news online and share links with friends – and that these friend-to-friend communications have become their reliable filters for what to trust. And that works for breaking news, but knowing tht good bloggers are out there working hard to identify and share kernels of truth about issues on an ongoing basis provides even more secure support for activists of any age.