Newsweek is Changing

American journalism is dying.

Newspapers are shedding reporters or shutting down entirely. TV stations are dropping correspondents (tell me about it!) and cancelling shows. News web sites have yet to find any way to make enough money to support actual reporting. The wheels have come off and no one knows if there’s even a vehicle on which to put them back on. So what to make of Newsweek Magazine’s attempt at a web-based reality show? How about WTF?

Earlier this week Newsweek launched a new web-only “reality” show called “The District” which it labels as a spoof. (Scroll down for the video). It’s their satiric look at what MTV might produce if “The Hills” starred Barack Obama moving to Washington instead of Lauren moving to LA (or Whitney moving to New York if you’re more of a fan of “The City”).

Anyway it’s pretty well done and clever in that SNL kinda way but what is Newsweek thinking? The magazine, owned by the Washington Post, has been losing ad pages at a rapid clip and went through a downsizing and repurposing a little more than a month ago.

The problem is that newsweeklies are about as relevant in their current form as is Dick Cheney. No one cares. What could Time or Newsweek possibly report about the past week that we haven’t all seen and heard and been inundated with analysis of? And so Newsweek is sprinting towards being smaller, less newsy, and more opinionated. Fine. You can argue about whether that’s a good strategy but at least they’re not lying down and dying.

Still this web-show raises a very different question, especially when you read the handful of comments on Newsweek’s website:

“oh my god, i love this.  i can’t stop watching *long vacant stare*  i need this on my iphone now. hurry with part 2.”

“This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen.  Please continue it, I can’t wait till the next episode!”

“Maybe I am a combination of a huge geek and a very shallow person but I love this. I would like Newsweek to cover the next four years this way. Do-able?”

Sure it’s mildly amusing but is Newsweek serving any greater good by using it’s very scare (and getting scarcer) resources to produce “The District”? I’m not trying to go Big J on the magazine or anything but I just can’t see how America needs it’s news dumbed down even further. Don’t we have Fox and MSNBC for that?

If Newsweek hopes to drive traffic to it’s site and thinks that once “District” fans are there they’re going to read Fareed Zakaria’s piece on Afghanistan or Barbie Nadeau’s piece on the wave of African immigrants coming ashore on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, they’re crazy.

If the point is just getting an audience why not just put some pictures of naked celebrities in Newsweek?

Maybe it’s nothing. Just a spoof. Chill out, DeDapper. Still there’s something corrosive here.

If it was on Comedy Central’s website it would be different. Then again with “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” Comedy Central does a better job of covering the news many days than the “real” news shows. So go ahead and laugh if you want to. Rome is burning. Let’s toast some marshmallows.