Howard Kurtz on Why Time is the Last Man Standing. (And Yeah, He Really Means ‘Man’)
With “the roof having fallen in” on Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, as Howard Kurtz puts it in today’s Washington Post, it’s Rick Stengel’s Time Magazine that’s become, as Stengel puts it, the newsweekly “category of one.”
So how does Time manage to stay profitable while the rest of us drown? Various ways. But one of them has to do with talent—male talent!
While he had to trim the roughly 200-person staff by a quarter over four years, relying more on freelancers, he has assembled a team of high-profile writers. These include a spate of journalists from The Post, including Michael Grunwald, David Von Drehle and Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman. Stengel also brought in Mark Halperin from ABC, Michael Crowley from the New Republic and, most recently, Fareed Zakaria from Newsweek.
Time has lost a few big-name contributors as well, including Michael Kinsley, Andrew Sullivan and Bill Kristol. And Stengel, a speechwriter for Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign, has no prominent conservative to balance liberal columnist Joe Klein.
Maybe we’re a wee-bit sensitive here, but, um, we get it, OK? Great—really great!—men have kept Time going. But what about Nancy Gibbs, who wrote the—as Kurtz describes it—“fascinating look back at the cultural impact of ‘The Pill’”? Or Aryn Baker, the controversial author of the magazine’s recent Afghanistan cover, who Stengel once called “dazzling”? Honestly, the same men making the same decisions and writing about the same men making those same decisions just gets old. Which brings us to this question: could more women have saved Newsweek? More on that to come.
-jessica
