It's a success! Well, almost ... and even it's almost-success doesn't seem to bode all that well for the media business. Ezra has it exactly right:
Here you have this forward-thinking, primarily virtual venture to
create a political news organization that marries old-school reporting
values to the speed and the immediacy of the web and it actually works.
A year-and-a-half after launch, it's getting 3.5 million unique
visitors per month and 25 million page views. And yet not only is it
unprofitable, but 60 percent of its revenues come from advertising in the 27,000 circulation print version. In other words: Politico
got the online readership it dreamed of, but it hasn't come even close
to figuring out how to monetize it. So they're reliant on the
Congress-section of their print paper, which can extract huge rates
from lobbying organizations and pressure groups. Were they actually web
only, they'd be losing catastrophic amounts of money. If The Politico
was an experiment to see if people would read more stuff about
politics, it was a success. But insofar as it sought a new business
model that would bring economic viability to online reportage, it's as
adrift as everyone else.
Apropos of the launch of LibertyWire, which promises to be a general-interest website along the lines of Slate, but more conservative, Matt writes:
This is a bit bizarre. Slate and The Atlantic are already center-right publications (I know my soon-to-be-former colleagues at The Atlantic don't necessarily see it that way, but it is).
I'll refrain from commenting on my own publication's politics and just say that describing Slate as "center-right" strikes me as more than a little weird. True, Slate publishes some writers whose politics Matt would probably describe as right-of-center - from Emily Yoffe and Mickey Kaus to Christopher Hitchens and maybe Will Saletan, among others. Personally, I would describe some of these people as either center-left or - in the case of Hitchens, especially - entirely unclassifiable, but for the sake of argument let's accept Yglesias's progressive-centric premises about who's right and who's left. Even then, it's awfully hard for me to see how a publication where Fred Kaplan is the go-to guy on foreign policy, where Dahlia Lithwick and Emily Bazelon cover law and social issues, where Timothy Noah writes about domestic policy and politics, and where everyone from David Greenberg to Stephen Metcalf to Meghan O'Rourke to Amanda Schaffer to Dana Stevens can be counted to provide a center-left (or just plain left) take almost anytime they touch on politics, can be reasonably described as "center-right."
Update: While I was writing this post, Matt clarified himself a bit: "I'll admit that while I look at Slate all the time, I'm not a
particularly thorough reader of it and the Mickey Kaus phenomenon looms
large in my mind." I think if the Mickey Kaus phenomenon looms large in your mind, then you're probably reading Mickey Kaus way more than you read Slate. (Which is easy to do, admittedly, if you spend most of your time reading blogs ...)
I was all set to attend what sounded like a great discussion on "The Dumbing Down of American Culture: Fact or Fiction?," featuring our own Michael Hirschorn (he of "The Case for Reality TV") - but then it was cancelled. So as a poor substitute, I'll offer a link to this Slate piece, in which Erik Lundegaard argues that once you control for marketing budgets and theater saturation (big things to control for, obviously), well-reviewed movies tend to outgross their badly-reviewed competitors. Lundegaard goes on to suggest that this proves that "quality matters," and that this means in turn that movie critics matter as well. I'd like to think so, and I'm sure they matter on the margins - I know I've avoided films I was intending to see because a critic I respected panned them - but in the aggregate I think his model is slightly flawed: He looks at the relationship between good reviews and good box office across a movie's entire run, a period in which word-of-mouth presumably becomes a big factor in how the movie performs. On the assumption that what your friend tells you about a given film may matter way more than what a critic tells you, I'd like to see the same analysis re-run but confined entirely to opening weekends, when word-of-mouth presumably is close to a non-factor, and when the critics are a moviegoer's only guide to which films are worth seeing and which can be safely skipped.
That's one of the topics Walter Mossberg gestured at this afternoon in a talk on "the Future of the Internet and Rise of the Cell Phone," in which he declared that the PC has peaked, and that the future of the internet belongs to pocket computers like the iPhone. The future of the internet, and the future of us: "The internet is a grid," he remarked, "and we're all going to be living on it, and carrying it in our pocket all day long." Mossberg delivered this assessment with a strong note of techno-pessimism woven in: A lot of his talk had to do with the issues constant connectivity raises for deep knowledge ("people hate iPhone users," he remarked, "because you can never have an argument about facts without them whipping out the phone and looking up the answer" - a description that I'm afraid I resemble, even though I have a Blackberry and not an iPhone) and deep reflection (in the future, Mossberg noted, we may never be free of "that subtle feeling that maybe you need to check Slate, or Facebook"), and he echoed some of the points that Nicholas Carr makes in his Atlantic essay on how the internet may be changing the way we think, and not necessarily for the better.
Tellingly, nearly all the questions that followed had to do with how the attendees could get their internet service to work more cheaply and smoothly - especially in Aspen.
Jennifer Schuessler mines the new NEA report on artists in the U.S. economy for this terrifying statistic:
Between 1990 and 2000, the number of writers in the United States increased by 21.5 percent, during a time when the population as a whole increased only 13.2 percent.
I don't subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, but I usually manage to read at least every other issue cover-to-cover (I always buy it for plane reading), which is more than I can say for an awful lot of magazines. So I guess I'm basically in the same camp as Tyler Cowen and Seth Roberts, who discuss their EW-love at length here.
Yesterday, New York's Daily Intel offered the following fret about ex-Gawker editor Emily Gould's big cover story in the Sunday Times Magazine - a personal essay about personal lives in the age of blogging, or something like that:
What troubles us about Gould's oncoming article is not that it will be a rehash of everything we've seen before. It's that people will mistake her perspective on the Internet, writing, and fame as the perspective of an entire generation of bloggers. (Much the way, as the Observer noted, Joyce Maynard's essay in the Times Magazine in 1972 seemed to speak for a generation of young women.) In our experience reading her work, she rarely ventures outside of her own head. Hence, not the best representative of a social subclass. Millions of people blog, many of them about themselves. But if past work is anything to judge by, we're not going to be reading about them this weekend. Except for the ones Gould slept with.
They needn't have worried: I seriously doubt that even the least internet-savvy reader will mistake Gould's astonishingly dull non-romp through her deeply trivial travails for the voice of a generation of bloggers. The only question is who comes out of this piece looking worse - Gould herself, or whichever editor thought her limp prose and less-than-riveting love life deserved 7937 words in one of America's best magazines.
As you may have noticed, my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg has been foolish enough to start a blog. Meanwhile, Doublethink Online is hosting brand-new blogs by James Poulos (is there anywhere hedoesn'tblog?) and Sonny Bunch. You should check them out - especially on days like today, when posting gets a bit slack around these parts.
I should note that we've also posted the audio from a West Virginia University panel on "Digital Media and the 2008 Election" on iTunes. The event featured Matt and myself, among other luminaries, and it inspired John Cole, in attendance, to remark:
Ross reminded me less of a conservative writer than he did a sociology teacher who sleeps with his students. Think Donald Sutherland in Animal House.
Maybe I should reconsider the beard-tweed combination.
Jim Manzi, professional smartypants, has just joined Reihan's ever-expanding stable of writers over at The American Scene. Here's his first post, riffing on something Jonah wrote on scientific progress and moral progress. And here's a longer taste of Manzi, writing on evolution (and against both the "evolution requires embracing atheism" and "religion requires embracing intelligent design" sets) for NR.
Alex Massie has provocative thoughts on how being able to track reader interest on a story-by-story basis will change the newspaper business:
I know of at least one (non-US) paper where real-time web traffic figures play a role in shaping editorial decisions - at least in terms of prominence issues. That will only continue and more and more print editions will be influenced by web traffic as stories are published on the web hours before they become available in print (at least for as long as print editions continue to exist). So the boffins will analyse traffic data and note that past stories about Issue X have brought in 7% more traffic than ones about Issue Y; therefore we're going with Issue Y. Editing by numbers, quite literally.
There are upsides to this, of course: you can provide stuff you know readers actually want to read. On the other hand, it's likely to limit creative thinking and it will take strong - and unusually gifted and perceptive - editors to resist the sirens of the web traffic stats. Or rather, those that can marry the data analysis with original thinking that breaks out of a formula will be the most impressive (from a journalistic point of view at least - though possibly also commercially speaking). They'll also be the ones whose hunches - or luck - get them ahead of the market in terms of perceiving what the coming stories are likely to be.
Read the whole thing. What Massie's talking about dovetails with Michael Hirschorn's piece in the latest Atlantic, which argues that newspapers' most-emailed lists would make better guides to what should go on the front page than the usual "this is what we think is important today" calculation. But Hirschorn is rather more sanguine about what this will mean for the quality, if not the capital-I Importance, of what newspapers decide to cover and/or highlight. I've excerpted his argument below the fold:
Sorry for the light posting - I'm crashing on a piece, and bleary-eyed from the World Series. While I recover, go read David Kirkpatrick on the religious right's semi-crack-up, if you haven't already; also Theodore Dalrymple's fine City Journal essay on the new atheism; any number of things in the new Claremont Review of Books; and Terry Teachout:
I suppose we all reach a moment in our lives when we lose interest in the new, and I suspect that moment comes sooner for technology than for art. For now I seem to be staying fairly open to new things--my experience as a blogger suggests as much--but I have yet to send my first text message, nor does my somewhat superannuated cellphone contain a digital camera. On the increasingly rare occasions when I feel the need to take a picture of something, I buy a disposable film camera, the postmodern equivalent of a Brownie, at the corner drugstore.
Today a friend walked into my office, all abuzz over some new online service or gizmo - let's call it "Z." He tried to describe to me what it does, failed, and said: "Oh, it's like a much slicker version of Y." I responded, "What's Y?" He said - "Oh, well, it's the newer, more popular version of X." I said: "What's X?" Which suggests that I'm well on my way to crossing the Teachout threshold.
And that reminds me - as a public service announcement, I should mention that while I have a Facebook account, I have never ever used it for anything (except once to look at someone else's Facebook page), and frankly I don't even know my own password. So if you've asked me to be your friend or otherwise acted friendly in the Facebook realm, I'm not ignoring you: I'm just ignoring, you know, the modern world.
James Wolcott, on the controversy over JPod's appointment to be editor of Commentary:
... it's ridiculously prissy for Podhoretz's doubters and detractors to act as if Commentary risks infection from the alien virus of popular culture. Before it became strictly the lyric sheet for perpetual war, Commentary ran numerous essays about popular culture without feeling it had to apologize to Lionel Trilling. It ran a number of Robert Warshow's influential essays, it published Jewish hipsters such as Albert Goldman, Seymour Krim, and the young future director James Toback, for years it featured a film-review column by William S. Pechter, it even made room for Clive James's brilliant tour de force about Norman Mailer's Marilyn ...
Point is, if I know about Commentary's record of popcult coverage, shouldn't its contributors and donors have more of a clue instead of treating young Pod as if he were the lucky sperm club's tribute to Roger Ebert?
Indeed. The Times quotes Podhoretz saying that there won't be a "popping up" of the magazine - i.e. no "cover stories on 'Gossip Girl'" - but I'm with Andy Ferguson:
[JPod]'s style is a mix of “Mad magazine meets Foreign Affairs,” said Mr. Ferguson, who added he should develop that sensibility as editor. Commentary has such an air of sacred reverence around it, he said, that Mr. Podhoretz, may be “the only intellectual and conservative in America who is not intimidated by it and who could therefore change it.”
I suspect that Commentary won't stop running the occasional unpersuasive defense of neoconservatism under its new editor, but I'm hoping that - JPod's protestations to the Times notwithstanding - it makes room for that Gossip Girl piece. (I'm sure Reihan would be available to write it.)
Always Scribble, Scribble, Scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?
I'm late joining the back-and-forth between Ezra Klein and Jason Zengerle - continued here and here and here, with Matt chiming in here - on whether there's anything like merit pay for journalists, but here's my two cents. I basically agree with Ezra that print journalists' salaries tend to be determined "through some undefined mixture of our editors liking our work and our office presence, the time we've been at the magazine, our age, and so forth," and that this doesn't bear much of a resemblance to a system that pays teachers based on their students' test scores, which is the sort of "merit pay" that kicked off the whole discussion. Jason's right that some media institutions, the Atlantic included, make an effort to figure out who's reading what in the magazine and filter that information into staffing decisions, but I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets when I say that this remains a highly inexact science, and one that plays a pretty small role in how much everyone gets paid.
However, one factor that Ezra leaves out is output, and especially freelance work, which for many journalists is either a major source of supplementary income or their only source of income, and which follows a somewhat stricter, easily-defined metric than salaries at the Prospect or the Atlantic: The more words you write, the more you get paid. It's not exact by any means, since a freelancer who writes 10,000 words for Esquire and GQ over the course of a year will make more money than one who writes 20,000 words for the assortment of Beltway political magazines, but it's a place, and a pretty important one, where the statistical correlation between performance (measured by words produced) and pay is somewhat more direct.
And then there's the blogosphere, where we do know (roughly) who reads what, and how well individual writers are doing in attracting readers. At least a few prominent bloggers already have deals with their publications whereby they're paid more for higher traffic, and less for lower traffic, and of course if you run your own blog, your blog-ad revenue is determined by how many readers you attract. So as journalism becomes less print-bound and more bloggy, Ezra's claim that journalists don't get paid for performance, of some kind at least, will be less valid than it today. Whether it's the sort of performance that makes for high-quality journalism is another question entirely.
A very long, very interesting piece of analysis from Alex Massie. A snippet:
Atrios (Duncan Black) for instance, is a tabloid columnist manque. He has exactly the right combination of spite, sneering and bullying for the job. It's ferociously partisan and bracingly, gratuitously unfair, mean-spirited, sexist, wearisome, entertaining, etc etc. That's why his blog is gripping. In other words: it works. If you were to put a British tabloid in Washington, Atrios would be right at home on its op-ed pages (and his presence would add greatly to the gaiety of the nation). His "Wanker of the Day" feature is a stylistic flourish that would be right at home on the pages of Britain's best-selling newspapers. It's also easy to imagine the Firedoglake collective on the pages of a British mid-market tabloid.
To Paul Krugman's complaint that right-wing triumphs get characterized by the mass media as "conservatives on the march," while liberal triumphs produce headlines about a return to the "center," Matt writes:
But here's the thing, I've heard conservatives complain about this too. When conservatives secure political power, it's all "holy shit: conservatives!" but when liberals secure political power, it's all "don't worry, they're centrists." There's truth to both perspectives here, but I think the right fundamentally has the better of this argument. It wouldn't have been helpful to liberals or to liberalism for Time to greet the 2006 elections with a photo of Nancy Pelosi flanked by Charlie Rangel, Henry Waxman, David Obey, and John Conyers under the headline "THE LIBERAL TAKEOVER."
That said, it does pound in some narratives that matter. To go back to my Heath Shuler article, it was the Right who sought to argue that he was a conservative. They did that because it was good for the press to report the election as a triumph for "conservatism," that reigning ideology that had been failed by perfidious Republicans. So rather than the collapse of years of unified conservative rule being seen as the failure of the ideology, which would in turn lead the press to paint future adherents as politically radioactive, it actually enhanced the superficial appeal of "pure conservatism."
I think both Matt and Ezra are right, because they're talking about different terminology. To the extent that the term "conservative Democrat" creeps into the narrative where Democrats like Shuler and Jim Webb are concerned, it's a (minor) victory for conservative talking points. To the extent that winning Democrats are described as centrists, though, it's a sign that liberal media bias - in which a moderate liberalism is the center, and everything else is right-wing kookery - is defining the terms of the discussion.
I started out a big Sarah Silverman fan, but I don't know ... I think it's enough already. The obligatory New Yorker profile called her brilliantly-conceived comic persona "quiet depravity", but I think "naive depravity" describes it better. At her best, Silverman plays the nice Jewish girl from a nice bourgeois family who remains blissfully unaware that she's a terrible, terrible person. It's hard to describe why this persona works so well; better to just quote it in bulk, as the New Yorker's Dana Goodyear wisely did:
“I’m just sensitive,” she says onstage. “My skin is paper thin. People don’t realize it, because I’m sassy and I’m brassy, but I just— I see these care commercials with these little kids with the giant bellies and the flies, and these are one- and two-year-old babies, nine months pregnant, and it breaks my heart in two.”
As the audience reacts, she presses on. “It breaks my heart in half. And I don’t give money, because”—out of the side of her mouth—“I don’t want them to spend it on drugs, but I give. You know I give. I, this past summer, sent fifteen really fun cowl-neck sweaters to this village in Africa, in really fun colors—expecting nothing, by the way—and they culled their money together, whatever they call it, and bought a stamp and sent me a postcard thanking me, and it said thank you and that they had enough sweaters for every single member of the village to get one and that they were delicious.”
...In another of her bits, she invokes the events of September 11th: “They were devastating. They were beyond devastating. I don’t want to say especially for these people, or especially for these people, but especially for me, because it happened to be the same exact day that I found out that the soy chai latte was, like, nine hundred calories. I had been drinking them every day. You hear soy, you think healthy. And it’s a lie.”
Now obviously this sort of act doesn't translate all that well to the kind of things that really successful comics are asked to do - like, say, host award shows. But I still think it's instructive, and a little depressing, to contrast the Silverman routine quoted above with her now-famous takedowns of Paris Hilton (at the '06 VMAs) and Britney Spears (at this year's edition).
First, a correction: I suggested that the appearance of Scott Thomas Beauchamp's "Baghdad Diarist" was "a case of a magazine giving a break to a young writer ... because the young writer's likeable wife asked them to," but I am reliably informed that Beauchamp and his future wife were only acquaintances when she mentioned him to TNR's editors.
Second, TNR has posted another update, in which they write that the Army, by restricting access to Beauchamp and refusing to share any of the details of its own investigation, has thrown up a wall to further inquiry. TNR's critics, needless to say, aren't buying.
At this point, the Beauchamp story is beginning to bear more than a passing resemblance to the Libby affair. Both are Iraq War-related controversies in which the underlying accusation (perjury in a case where no criminal charges were filed, embellishment or fabulism in a back-page TNR Diarist) is less significant than what the alleged crime is supposed to represent: In Libby's case, the "Bush lied, people died" theory of the war; in the Beauchamp affair, the belief that the press is actively undermining the American mission in Iraq. And in each instance, not only the interpretation but the facts of the case seem to shift depending on whose account you read. I hope that we'll reach a point with the Beauchamp case where at least the facts will be agreed upon, but I wouldn't bet on it; barring a public, obviously uncoerced recantation from Beauchamp himself (or his corroborating witnesses), or a military investigation that vindicates his claims, it seems more likely to end, like the Libby affair before it, as a matter of whom you believe, and why.
In a graphic illustration of how the Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal is tearing Washington apart, neoconservative and sometime-TNR contributor Eli Lake more or less agrees with me about the significance of the Beauchamp controversy, while neoconservative and sometime-TNR contributor Charles Krauthammer agrees with Ace of Spades and company.
The most telling moment in Lake's conversation with Mike Crowley, I think, comes when Lake says something about Beauchamp being a creep, and Crowley responds that he doesn't really know the guy, but that his wife, the TNR staffer Elspeth Reeve, is "absolutely the sweetest person that I know." This could be construed as further support for the "Frank Foer is risking his magazine's reputation and his job because he doesn't want to tell a junior staffer that her husband is a liar" theory of the case. But it really suggests, once again, that this was a case of a magazine giving a break to a young writer not because his work "fits perfectly into the most virulent narrative of the antiwar left," as Krauthammer would have it, but because the young writer's likeable wife asked them to. They got burned as a result, and deservedly so. But not because they hate America.
I appreciate Matt's extended reflection on careerist motivations in the foreign policy community; I've often felt that he's very quick to leap to the "professional incentives" explanation for some argument or another, and it's interesting to see his thoughts laid out at length on the subject. I think that his argument is strongest when he writes:
People aren't bribed into changing their views. But people know that if they have a view on some topic that's impolitic to express, the smart thing to do is find some different issue to talk about. So you wind up with Michael O'Hanlon and Kurt Campbell writing a book which says we've over-militarized our foreign policy, but that nonetheless concludes that there's no case for cuts in overall defense expenditure and no planned weapons systems that should be eliminated. Similarly, if you take the view that the view that there's neither a strong national interest case, nor a strong case from universal morality, for making Israel the largest recipient of US foreign aid spending, you find a topic other than US aid to Israel to write and speak about.
In other words, careerism doesn't shape what people write so much as it shapes what they don't write. I certainly notice this in my own writing: I can't think of any opinions I've expressed that I didn't wholeheartedly believe (at least at the moment I expressed them), but I can certainly think of opinions that have gone unexpressed because I'm more circumspect about what lines I cross (and what people I risk offending) than perhaps I should be. And I'm a wannabe pundit, with a much weaker set of "don't break ranks" career incentives than someone who's angling for a government job.
Of my conversation with Jon Chait this morning - in which I argued that TNR probably shouldn't have run the Scott Thomas Beauchamp pieces, but also contended that the right-wing blogosphere's reaction has often run well over-the-top - Ace of Spades writes:
Okay, Ross.You keep earning your reasonable stripes by basically kissing your liberal pals' asses while meanwhile saying nothing at all -- except to the extent you just agree with what your betters have figured out before you did.
On the other hand, it gets rather good here. Here Douthat notes what was pointed out to him by the "ludicrous" "Michelle Malkin slash Ace of Spades front" -- namely, that Beauchamp seems to have most likely lied, and not made an "error," in claiming the Burned Woman mockery occurred in Iraq rather than Kuwait -- and Jonathan Chait admits that it does seem reasonable to conclude Beauchamp did not make an "error" but rather deliberately lied.
Remember, though, Douthat, who did nothing on this story, is superior to any of us rightwing crazies simply by parroting what we have written.
Just to clarify what I had in mind when I used the word "ludicrous," here's a snippet from one of Ace's earlier posts:
It seems that "Scott Thomas" got himself a nice little gig at TNR -- a possible stepping stone to bigger and better things, like a literary agent and first-time-novelist's advance of $100,000 -- but he had one problem: He had nothing actually interesting to report. The routine relocation of bodies from a cemetery to a new resting place wasn't going to get him that advance, after all. So, as any budding writer would do, he used the power of imagination to make it all seem much more interesting than it actually was.
And TNR fell for it, of course. They wanted the prestige of having an actual reporter on the ground in Baghdad, and of course they wanted the stories coming from that correspondent to be as horrific and morale-killing as possible. They wanted to believe, and so they did.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are always telling me to cut David Brooks more slack, to extend the assumption of good faith, to listen to the interesting things he has to say. So I'd really like one of them to dissolve my current impression that Brooks' latest column -- which tries to make the argument that the economy really is in very good shape, save for some issues with inequality -- isn't a pack of lies and deceptions.
I don't know about "pack," since much of what Brooks has to say I agree with: The Hacker thesis about rising income volatility seems increasingly dubious; globalization has brought a host of benefits to middle-class Americans, in terms of lower prices and greater diversity of goods, that don't show up in wage growth figures; much of the growth in income inequality is the result of trends like performance pay, longer hours for upper-income workers, and the increasing value of major corporations, none of which are amenable to easy policy fixes; tax revenues are higher and the deficit is in better shape than most liberals predicted a few years ago; and so forth.
But yes, the first two assertions Brooks makes in his column are technically correct but misleading, and if Ezra thinks that makes him a liar than I doubt there's anything I can do to disabuse him of the notion. While critiquing the doom and gloom of the neopopulists, Brooks cites rising incomes for poor families over the last twenty-five years without noting that they've stagnated or fallen in the last five; he cites wage growth figures from last year without noting that they're down in the first six months of this year; and he uses "average" wages rather than "median" wages, when the latter tends to be a better tool for assessing how the typical worker is doing. Tyler Cowen mounts a defense of the latter two points here, noting, among other things, that the "average wage" measure in question excludes management-level wages (including the skyrocketing CEO salaries that can skew averages upward) and is therefore a more solid metric than Brooks' opponents argue. But overall, I think the liberal critics are right, and Brooks' use of the data in these two examples deserves criticism and correction.
Whether that justifies calling him a "liar," or whether it might be more appropriate to treat him the way I would assume Ezra would like to be treated himself - as a fallible pundit who is sometimes insufficiently skeptical about information that dovetails with his preconceptions, and who merits respectful disagreement in such cases rather sneering and name-calling - well, make up your own mind. I'm done arguing about David Brooks. I think he's an excellent columnist; I think his body of work speaks for itself; I think that liberals who demand that the Times sack him every time he gets a piece of data wrong or attacks a straw man or commits one of the hundreds of venial sins that every columnist commits (yes, even Paul Krugman) should get a grip. And that's where I'll leave it.
... to the extent the Slates and NROs and TNRs and Salons of the world serve as curators and gardeners, trimming, pruning, and shaping, I think they'll continue to serve a valuable and valued function.
... Consider The New Republic under Andrew Sullivan, much maligned by liberals today and celebrated at the time. As a collection of strange personalities, the magazine was peerless: it is no coincidence that the best of our bloggers, Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan (our mutually antagonistic bloggers), are alums of that era of TNR. But you also had unlikely dispatches from unlikely writers, which reflected this cultivated collective personality. A hive mind is better than a single mind. And what's a really great magazine if not a hive mind?
I don't think - and I certainly don't hope - that magazines as we know them will go the way of the dodo in the internet age. I think that certain kinds of magazines don't work as well anymore (Time and Newsweek, for instance, and maybe some of the opinion journals), and will either have to change or die - but in the same way that I don't see books becoming electronic anytime soon, I tend to think that the magazine-as-object will still exist in 2025 and beyond. People like the glossy photographs, they like the hive-mind quality that Reihan identifies, they like getting something book-like in the mail. Circulation will doubtless drop, but the magazine market will still exist, and you'll still see the newsstands with their endless plane and train-reading options. (At least, I think you will.)
I finally got around to reading - okay, skimming - Tom Junod's Esquire profile of Angelina Jolie, which Ron Rosenbaum famously called "the worst celebrity profile ever written." Junod's campaign for Angelina's canonization provides plenty of ammunition for this judgment, in a certain way, but I would submit that Rosenbaum is missing the point: Given that it is self-evidently impossible to write a good celebrity profile, the only thing that a talented writer can strive for in such circumstances is the sort of maximal absurdity that's calculated to, well, drive a Ron Rosenbaum around the bend. Insofar as Junod achieved this with his self-evidently ridiculous "this is a 9/11 story" story about Jolie, he should be applauded, rather than condemned.
Or put another way - given a choice between reading Junod's ludicrous, pretentious, wildly over-the-top Jolie profile and a typically dreadful, "I spent thirty minutes with a star and I'm being paid to make her seem sexually attainable to my readers" celebrity piece like, say, GQ's cover story this month on "The Summer of Jessica Biel," I'll take Junod every day of the week.
They're still working out some kinks in the site, I believe, but if you don't go check out the kick-ass design and crack team of bloggers Reihan has put together over at what was once our shared home, well, you shouldn't be reading blogs to begin with.
I did it. I read - with, okay, some skimming here and there - Paul Berman's behemoth of an essay on Tariq Ramadan. And you know what? There's a pretty good piece buried under all those words, one that uses Ian Buruma's favorable treatment of Ramadan, and his unfavorable treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to illustrate the tendency of Western liberals to prefer Islamists of a seemingly-moderate stripe to anti-Islamists, like Ali, who seem too strident. Such a piece would have been a valuable contribution to the debate over whether Western liberalism should seek dialogue with the more moderate elements within political Islam - with Ramadan a prime example - or pursue confrontation instead, along the lines suggested by Ali. I'm by no means certain which side of that debate I'm on, Buruma's or Berman's, but that's all the more reason for TNR to run an essay that contributes substantially to the argument.
But such a piece could have been about, oh, I don't know, 5,000 words long. A 28,000-word essay, by contrast, needs to do more than raise troubling questions about Tariq Ramadan (which Berman successfully does); it needs to demolish him, to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt the debt he owes to Qutbian thought and beyond Qutb to National Socialism, to lay bare his sympathies for global jihad and expose his desire to bring the whole edifice of European liberalism crashing down. It needs to include more meat, less hemming and hawing ("I have no way to resolve this quandary, except to hazard a guess that all these writers, friend and foe alike, may have arrived at a truth ...), fewer forays into portentous speculation ("And does he dream in secret of something larger? Maybe he does, on some theological level, which would not be unusual. All great religions dream great (and dangerous) dreams") and equally portentous understatement ("a fascist label, or some reasonably similar term, seems faintly applicable--or more than faintly--even now ...). It needs to include, above all, fewer passages like this one:
Caroline Fourest, in Brother Tariq, makes the argument that, in the end, the ambiguity in Ramadan's outlook can only serve to confer legitimacy on the revolutionary Islamist idea, which is willy-nilly bound, in turn, to elevate ever so slightly terrorism's prestige. Fourest pictures a young man from North Africa in France, attending a lecture by Ramadan, and she wonders what ideas somebody like that might take away. Hamel, in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan, scoffs at Fourest's argument and observes that, for all the accusations against Ramadan, nothing has ever been proved, and out of the many thousands of people who have in fact attended his lectures, only a single person, a man from the Lyon district, is known to have ended up in Al Qaeda's Afghan training camps. Who is right in this dispute?
Hamel, the scoffer, would carry the day in a court of law. Still, it is easy to imagine that, in a small way, Fourest may be on to something.
"Ever so slightly ... it is easy to imagine ... in some small way." When Berman writes of Ramadan's discussion of Salafist terror that "a veil of timidity and euphemism hangs over the entire discussion, which could lead a sleepy reader to miss his meaning altogether," he could just as easily be describing his own essay, which builds up great expectations but turns out to include nothing that could not have been argued more tightly, more briskly, and more convincingly at a fifth the length.
Reihan has a detailed response to Patrick Ruffini's thought-provoking post on movement conservatism after Bush (which is the continuation of an interesting back-and-forth he's been having with Soren Dayton), so I'll confine myself to addressing this line:
A new conservative movement would, as the gravitational pull of these things go, make the GOP more conservative. And that would mean largely undoing the Bush legacy in domestic policy. A new agenda will not come from the pages of the New York Times or the Atlantic.
Um ... that would be the Atlantic that published James Q. Wilson's "Broken Windows," Dinesh D'Souza's "Illiberal Education," Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's "Dan Quayle Was Right," and Bernard Lewis's "The Roots of Muslim Rage" - to name just a few of what I think could be fairly described as "agenda-setting" pieces for the American Right. Now obviously the Atlantic is not a movement-conservative magazine, and thus it's never going to be the primary place where the Right's internal debates get hashed out. It is, however, a magazine with a long tradition of publishing interesting ideas and arguments from across the political spectrum, and it's a place that has historically been far more hospitable to conservatives than certainother general-interest magazines I can think of. And a conservative movement that writes off the Atlantic - and by extension any non-movement publication - as irrelevant to its agenda is a conservative movement with a seriouscocooning problem.
Like Peter Suderman, I wasn't exactly blown away by Radar Magazine's hitjob on Adam Moss's New York Magazine. I don't read New York all that much, but then again it isn't written for me - like so many things in Gotham, it's written for Manhattanites and aspiring Manhattanites (whether they live in Brooklyn, Boston, or Topeka), not for Yankee-hating New Englanders transplanted inside the Beltway. It's dedicated, as Peter says, to exploring the lives and lifestyles of the New York elite - and more importantly "the middle and upper-middle class strivers who desperately want to be part of the true elite" - which is why it doesn't do the kind of "rollicking, narrative-driven, first-person journalism" that the Radar piece accuses of it failing to produce. It does "fail," sure, in the same way that Entertainment Weekly and National Review and Good Housekeeping all fail to channel the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson - because it isn't that kind of magazine. Maybe it was once, but no more - and it's pretty good at being what it is now.
Oh, but Radar has Adam Moss's number:
New York takes no chances, climbs out on no limbs, plants no flags. It is the only magazine, with the possible exception of Christianity Today, in which you will find photographs of clothed (!) virgins illustrating an issue purportedly devoted to sex, to cite just one missed opportunity for mixing it up.
Yes, if only there was some brave magazine editor out there daring enough to cross America's Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice and put out a "Sex" issue with some naked people on the cover. There's hardly anything like that in the magazine world these days. And there's certainly none of it at Adam Moss's New York.
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