I was alerted to this story when clicking on the latest column by David Brooks. (He writes for the New York Times as well as appearing as a regular commentator, along with Mark Shields, on the PBS News Hour. Brooks and Shields debate issues with logic and civility, providing an alternative to the great number of media boors who daily shout their heads off at one another to great applause.)
First I must confess that I didn't quite know what The Daily Beast (warning: some material on their website is not what I would call "edifying") was. Wikipedia tells me it's an online clearinghouse providing links to news, feature, and opinion items as well as having original content. The writers are top notch as is the editor, Tina Brown, who used to run The New Yorker. Newsweek I knew as a boy, though I've not looked at it much lately. Our family subscribed to it and I used to pore over it from junior high school onwards, enjoying well-written pieces on a range of topics.
Anyhow, it seems both Newsweek and The Daily Beast have become huge money losers but recently decided to join forces. For starters, if you go to newsweek.com from now on, or soon, you'll be directed to The Daily Beast. Most commentators, it appears, think this merger is a dumb idea and bound to fail, but Brooks sees it differently. Brooks, I find, tends to think outside the box more than most and believes the venture may have a chance. Referring to 19th century intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson (apologizing, as it were, for doing so, realizing how irrelevant most Americans would find any reference before, say,1980) Brooks presents the philosophy behind magazines like Newsweek when they were founded. Emerson thought people in a democracy should know about the great western cultural tradition and it was not unusual for ordinary people--butchers, bakers, etc.--in those days to own and read the classics. The original Newsweek, Brooks thinks, followed that belief in the need for a "liberal education" (in the old sense of the term) by dealing with high art, science, and literature as well as politics and train wrecks.
Such breadth of coverage lost favor in recent decades and gradually was replaced by a concentration on "news you can use," or news to amuse: stuff designed to boost our egos along with videos of people running into walls on bicycles and the like. (This is an extremely broad brush summary, a caricature if you will, of what Brooks was getting at.)
Bottom line? Brooks thinks the public may be ready to once again learn stuff that is more than on the surface (material that is the intellectual equivalent of Moe whacking Larry with a pipe wrench to the sound of a metallic ping, etc.) As a reader and writer, I hope Brooks is right and that maybe, just maybe, our society could be starting to trend away from its shallowness and incivility. English society at the end of the 18th century was crude, rude, and cruel (slave trading, cockfights, etc.) but began to get better in the next, thanks in part to reformers like William Wilberforce.
Change can happen. Let's pray that it does.
First I must confess that I didn't quite know what The Daily Beast (warning: some material on their website is not what I would call "edifying") was. Wikipedia tells me it's an online clearinghouse providing links to news, feature, and opinion items as well as having original content. The writers are top notch as is the editor, Tina Brown, who used to run The New Yorker. Newsweek I knew as a boy, though I've not looked at it much lately. Our family subscribed to it and I used to pore over it from junior high school onwards, enjoying well-written pieces on a range of topics.
Anyhow, it seems both Newsweek and The Daily Beast have become huge money losers but recently decided to join forces. For starters, if you go to newsweek.com from now on, or soon, you'll be directed to The Daily Beast. Most commentators, it appears, think this merger is a dumb idea and bound to fail, but Brooks sees it differently. Brooks, I find, tends to think outside the box more than most and believes the venture may have a chance. Referring to 19th century intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson (apologizing, as it were, for doing so, realizing how irrelevant most Americans would find any reference before, say,1980) Brooks presents the philosophy behind magazines like Newsweek when they were founded. Emerson thought people in a democracy should know about the great western cultural tradition and it was not unusual for ordinary people--butchers, bakers, etc.--in those days to own and read the classics. The original Newsweek, Brooks thinks, followed that belief in the need for a "liberal education" (in the old sense of the term) by dealing with high art, science, and literature as well as politics and train wrecks.
Such breadth of coverage lost favor in recent decades and gradually was replaced by a concentration on "news you can use," or news to amuse: stuff designed to boost our egos along with videos of people running into walls on bicycles and the like. (This is an extremely broad brush summary, a caricature if you will, of what Brooks was getting at.)
Bottom line? Brooks thinks the public may be ready to once again learn stuff that is more than on the surface (material that is the intellectual equivalent of Moe whacking Larry with a pipe wrench to the sound of a metallic ping, etc.) As a reader and writer, I hope Brooks is right and that maybe, just maybe, our society could be starting to trend away from its shallowness and incivility. English society at the end of the 18th century was crude, rude, and cruel (slave trading, cockfights, etc.) but began to get better in the next, thanks in part to reformers like William Wilberforce.
Change can happen. Let's pray that it does.
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