If "Weekly" is So Yesterday, How Do We Explain These Round-Ups
Newsweek has been mercilessly and endlessly dissected, for it seems, years now. Time and U.S. News and World Report, its peers in the once-robust, now obsolescent, newsweekly trade, have undergone reinvention upon reinvention. The conventional wisdom (to borrow an old phrase iconized by Newsweek): weekly reading bio-rhythms are dead; it’s a 24/7 news world and let’s get on with it.
One problem: the human brain. While we can all churn out the content 24/7, our brains’ evolution progress seems to be, at the minimum, multi-generational. Yes, we can multi-task at better speeds, but the toll — eulogized by Nick Carr and others — is unknown. We still like sum-ups and intelligent pointers.
So against that backdrop, let’s point out two recent additions to the web that help us followers of the news industry make sense of the new news. Irony: they are both weekly; helping us catch up on what seems to be a duration of time that still makes some atavistic sense to us.
Mark Coddington at the Nieman Journalism Lab does an admirable job with his aptly named “This Week in Review.” And Matt Creamer‘s “Best Media Writing of the Week” on AdAge does the same. Note the catchy names of both, and that both are packages of well- and thoughtfully recommended links.
Sid Harman, dial home.