[lbo-talk] sketching an "anti-economist"

[Jeffrey Fisher]

On 8/20/07, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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 To be perfectly honest, I think the newsweekly format is obsolete and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 don't think any of this is mutually exclusive with print news, whether
daily or weekly. And I admit I do still like the idea of a weekly along the
lines of the Economist that has no long interviews or investigative pieces
or whatever. One of my biggest problems is basically time management. I
don't get to read the news every day, and while I do rely heavily on the
Internet for news, I get sidetracked so easily at my computer--and I spend
so much time there, already--that there are real practical advantages to
having a print something in front of me. That way I know that if I've looked
it over, I have a pretty good idea what's going on. A weekly is a nice sort
of safety net, that way. If there are things I've skipped for whatever
reason during the week, it's a sort of second chance.

Whether or not print is effectively obsolete, for news or anything else, is
a separate conversation, I think. As for group blogs, I agree that it is an
excellent format for the content you're talking about. But, again, I already
spend enough of my time at my computer. Which I love, don't get me wrong,
but I don't need yet another reason to stay here.

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)

Yep, an angel is exactly what I was thinking for my pie-in-the-sky pub. I
used to work for an e-zine (IntellectualCapital.com/Policy.com) that ran
essentially that way, and they were good days. We weren't making money, but
enough money was there to keep us going, and we were doing pretty good work
and it was a good place to work. Then we went all .com, and after that it
was just a matter of time.

On the upside, if you only want it to be online, that's relatively cheap.
Shoot, Doug and Liza could probably get it up and running any time they want
with relatively small investment. I'll bet they'd get writers coming out of
the woodwork. :)

j