White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Let’s Honor the ‘Thing’ of the Year

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By Llewellyn King

Many publications, following the lead of Time, name a “Person of the Year.” This year, Time chose German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

According to Time, the criteria to be chosen is “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”

So at this year’s end, I think it is time for those who make those choices to add a co-equal category: things. Things change everything. They have throughout history, but with increasing rapidity in the last 150 years. And they do it more dramatically now than ever before.

The magazine’s first “Person of the Year” (actually, back then it was “Man of the Year”) was Charles Lindbergh in 1927. He was hailed for his first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 20-21 that year.

Huge and brave as Lindbergh’s flight was, it was the airplane not the man, that changed aviation.

People change the way we live, but so do things. We now talk about the “Internet of Things,” where our home and work machines are all connected to the Internet. With this connectivity, a farmer will plow his fields from the local diner; and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, will have his drones ring the doorbell when they deposit parcels.

The unfolding political year will have much sound and fury. Candidates will promise that if elected, they will change the country for the better. Yet technology might change us more. Ergo, we should have a “Thing of the Year.”

I hereby declare the Internet as the “Thing of 2015.”

Why now? Because this was the first year we stopped being aghast at the changes the Internet is bringing about and simply accepted them as a reality — just as 100 years ago, the automobile went from being a novelty to being part of the fabric of life.

This Christmas was the “Internet Christmas.” We bought more from Web retailers than ever before, and did not marvel at it. It is just “the way we live now.”

For holiday greetings, the Internet began to beat out traditional cards sent in the mail. E-mailing your greetings is less labor intensive, and easier to personalize. Next year, expect more e-cards. If I worked at Hallmark, I would be pushing for additional electronic products before cards become another quaint piece of Americana on display at the Smithsonian, like rotary dial telephones.

I have not welcomed the Internet over the years. I like things the way they were. But this year was seminal for me: I decided the Internet, even the “Internet of Things,” was OK.

Particularly, I like the way the Internet reaches out to the sick, the shut-ins, the truly lonely and the homesick. I can send Christmas greetings to family and friends in Austria, England, South Africa and Vietnam, as I have, from a little device balanced on my lap. Wow!

Yes, with the Internet, you and I can fly across the Atlantic faster than Lindbergh could gun his throttle.

Here are some things that might change your life more than any political figure in the year ahead:

1. A prototype of a driverless car may zoom down a test track.

2. Home 3D printing will spread — so if you break something, you can make a new one.

3. All your appliances and gadgets will start speaking to each other: Using your cell phone, you will be able to defrost a steak in your home refrigerator while you are at work; or you will be able to get a diagnosis by taking a selfie of your inflamed eye.

4. Your electricity may be generated on the roof of your house, and a robot may make your bed.

5. A whole new generation of rockets will offer space rides,

6. New materials, only one-atom-thick, may enable you to fold up your television set and put it in your pocket.

Forget the politicians. Better ask the “things” what is in store; they are starting to talk to each other, and I do not want to be left out of the society of things. — For InsideSources

Newsweek: Another Magazine on the Brink

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In the golden age of print journalism, during the 1950s and 1960s, magazines were the aristocrats: glossy, sophisticated, used to money and generous to their own. Whereas newspapers were rough and urgent, works-in-progress, the great magazines (Paris Match, Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers and Picture Post) were finished like fine furniture–highly polished writing, designing by typographical architects and great platforms for displaying creative talent.

Paris Match, Life and Look went for the photographs, and heralded in a new generation of gifted photographers using the new technology of 35-millimeter Leicas. These picture magazines were the barons; their importance and prestige were unassailable.

Towering over them was Henry Luce’s Life. It was a magazine that thought it was a movie studio. Its principle was simple: seek perfection. For perfect pictures, it used the photographers of Magnum, a Paris-based cooperative founded by photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, among others, to protect photographers from exploitation.

Other magazines carried the foreign-policy debate as much as the newspapers. In The Saturday Evening Post, Stewart Alsop was able to argue the Vietnam War issue in lengthy articles, more thoughtful and nuanced than his brother Joe’s crude advocacy in a syndicated column. Over at Life’s sibling, Time, Luce fought communism, even where there wasn’t any. His magazine had such brio that its excesses were shaken off.

Besides, there was always Newsweek.

Ah, Newsweek: always trailing Time, but getting better all the time. So much so that until weeks ago, it could claim to have become the best of the news magazines.

Time, Newsweek and the also-ran U.S. News & World Report survived the plague of television that ended the reign of the news magazines. Of the great picture magazines, only Paris Match is alive.

Now Newsweek, owned by The Washington Post Company, has decided not to perish at the hands of the Internet, but to take a knife to its own wrists. Under its oh-so-public editor Jon Meacham, the magazine is seeking profitability according to an old and not very effective formula: slash the circulation to save print and distribution costs, and hope for a more exclusive readership sought by select advertisers. The Atlantic Monthly is trying the same solution, and so have many others but without success. In publishing, as in other businesses, shrinking is hard to do.

One thing Newsweek can be sure of is that previously loyal readers will abandon it without regrets. It has been transformed into something that is neither a news magazine nor any other kind of magazine. In appearance, it looks like a catalog for an art gallery. Worse, there are big advertising supplements that blend in so that readers don’t know whether they’re reading advertising or editorial content.

The magazine’s great writers, like Evan Thomas and Eleanor Clift, are clearly being held out of the battle. What remains of the reliable old features of Newsweek, “Conventional Wisdom” and “Verbatim,” are hard to find. It’s all very strange and disturbing.

News is no longer to be found in Newsweek. The new Newsweek is baroque in appearance and eccentric in subject. After the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, a photograph of a very young Kennedy stares from the cover and seven writers–from Bob Dole to Ben Bradlee and, of course, Jon Meacham–weigh in on “Understanding Teddy.” Didn’t he die? He’s not running for office again. A week later the magazine poses this question on its cover, featuring the face of a 6-month-old baby: Is Your Baby Racist?

The golden age has been over for magazines since the 1970s, but the news magazines held on for a quarter century longer. Now they are dying. Television drained the advertising from the picture magazines, now the Internet and the economy are closing in on the news magazines. Time has been the healthiest, U.S. News & World Report has surrendered to the Internet, and Newsweek has resorted to the publishing equivalent of plastic surgery. Shame.