Feral Beast: Newsweek axed 111 staffers last week

Monday, March 31, 2008

Newsweek axed 111 staffers last week

Newsweek is trimming very close to the bone, as disclosed by this informed media blog, on Radar.

Among those leaving are some of the magazine's best-known, most-admired and longest-service critics, including David Gates, David Ansen and Cathleen McGuigan. Harold Shain, a former president of the magazine, is also departing.
146 staffers were offered the chance to leave the magazine, with as much as two years of their current salary as a departing bonus, depending on their age and length of service. The package also includes pension sweetners and the chance to continue health insurance coverage until the age of 65. More staffers than expected accepted the offer

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Few of the folks who accepted the buy-out are foreign correspondents, and with so many staffers now departing by the end of the year(like rats off a sinking ship?), some new hires are expected.

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Feral Beast? Try Lemming

If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. A legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse. The words “feral beast” certainly wouldn’t come to mind. It’s not particularly accurate or particularly evocative. But that is how the departing British prime minister, Tony Blair, sees journalists: as malicious tormentors who have tried to tear him limb from limb.

--Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review

“Journalism is a form of cartography,” write Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach of Pew. “It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.”

"Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems." Adapted from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Retrospective : five decades of journalism as reported by CJR

Fake AP Stylebook reminds us: Unless you're doing a story on the Muppets, you are not a gonzo journalist.

"The once idealized information superhighway has become a parking lot of error, misinformation, rumor and junk." Poynter Institute, advocating a broader definition of who is a journalist.