I was a working journalist for many years doing both freelance reporting and analysis and working as a staff reporter on two major chain newspapers. The most journalistically instructive part came when I wrote paid-by-the piece stories and op-eds overseas from India, Spain and Bangladesh in the 70s for a variety of newspapers and magazines (including for the Newsweek bureau in Madrid right before dictator Francisco Franco died). I self syndicated to more than 20 newspapers all over the world.
The key to successfully selling freelance material was knowing your target market. Ditto on when I did the stories cabled or mailed (there was no Internet) from Madrid and Spain. When I wrote for the now defunct Chicago Daily News as part of their “Foreign Service,” the style was breezy, conversational, almost sensationalistic. When I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor (still my favorite newspaper) as their “Special Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor” the style was more serious, analytical. In fact, in my early transition to their style some of my stories became almost academic — so serious and dry that and a Monitor editor urged me to loose up a bit if I wanted more stories to be purchased by them (which I did). This was at the same time when I was writing writing zippy stories for the Chicago Daily News and op eds that ran on newspapers such as Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.
Metafilter offers THIS LINK to a fascinating page that suggests that Time Magazine is making similar adjustments when it markets its magazine — and what is shown doesn’t suggest that high a regard for the American readership.
Check it out. Do you see a pattern? Yes, it does seem like a kind of dumbing down where a serious topic really can’t appear on a magazine cover as it would during the same week elsewhere.
In fairness to Time, when I wrote for those weeks for the Newsweek bureau, the Newsweek edition sold in Europe was most assuredly not the same as the one in the U.S. (and there was a separate overall editor for it).
But when you go to the link there is a hugely different pattern in Time covers here in the U.S. and in Europe and Asia.
It’s the old question: do editors and also people in Hollywood who offer entertainment give the public what THE PUBLIC really wants or are they CONDITIONING THE PUBLIC to want what THEY think the public wants?
It’s a question Time might want to ponder (then what do I know writing here on our little, modest website TMV?).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.