The Perils of Weighing In

Newsweek, facing declining sales and losing money and advertisers, has decided to move away from it’s wrestling match with TIME and try and be a gutsier, more opinionated, less-soporific enterprise. This is pretty daring stuff, really. This is part of it:

“There’s a phrase in the culture, ‘we need to take note of,’ ‘we need to weigh in on,’ ” said Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham. “That’s going away. If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.”

This is sensible: one of the problems the news weeklies face is that they’re terribly predictable. This is, of course, a problem they now share with British Sunday newspapers. The formula, essentially unchanged in 20 years or more, has become rather dull and predictable hasn’t it? Nor is there much to choose between the Sundays: you know that each of them will cover pretty much the same stuff in pretty much the same way they always have.