On Sun, 19 Aug 2007, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
> BUT . . . wouldn't you *still* love a cool weekly like that?
To be perfectly honest, I think the newsweekly format is obsolete and constraining. News is better done by electronic media -- it comes instantly and you can enlarge it in any direction you want and customize it anyway you want. What I would chiefly want from my ideal weekly or monthly leftist magazine would be commentary. If the writers needed to cite news to make their point, by all means they should go to town. And if presenting news you didn't find elsewhere was their point, well then again, of course I'm all for it. But if their argument was better made citing history or culture, I'd rather they did that. What I want most is writing that is fresh and bracing. I definately don't feel that such a magazine should feel any duty to present the week's news comprehensively. They should print their best stuff each week, and they should let writers work on their articles as long as they need to get them right. They would always be topical stuff. But nowdays that would probably be better handled by a group blog.
I've always thought the ideal lefty magazine/website -- and nowadays, it would be more a website than a magazine -- would be something edited by Doug and Liza and funded by a billionaire angel who was happy to lose millions every year like they do with the Weekly Standard. So all we're missing is the angel. Should be a doddle these days! ;o)
Michael