I admire and respect Steve Jobs.
I also admire and respect Stephen Fry. The British actor/writer is a witty, brilliant man with whom I had the pleasure of working during my first years of Just For Laughs (actually as part of a double act called Fry and Laurie, with none other than Hugh Laurie, better known these days as the cantankerous Dr. House...but I digress).
Although in different fields, Steve and Stephen are each heavyweight masters at what they do.
Put 'em together though, like in last week's TIME Magazine, and you get somewhat of an ultra-lightweight embarrassment.
Proving decisively that two rights can make a wrong, Fry's unabashed fanboy ode to the iPad as part of the issue's cover story (that's it at right) made me cringe. At best, the sycophancy had enough suction to vacuum my garage/workshop floor to a spit-shine; at worst, it set journalistic standards back so far that Henry R. Luce must be gyroscoping in his grave.
Get this--describing the iPad experience as "closer to one's relationship with a person or an animal," Fry gushes about Apple "their products make users smile as they reach forward to manipulate, touch, fondle, slide, tweak, pinch, prod and stroke." Uh...mop on aisle 10, please! And in a related story, the Vatican has put in an order for 120,000 iPads for priests all over the world.
Indeed, the launch of the iPad was "the buzz story of the week" (and a tad more positive than Tiger's return to the fairways). But countering the credibility of Lev Grossman's introspective and intelligently critical dissertation of the device with Fry's drooling made me wonder just what business TIME was in these days.
A quick flip to page 6 stopped my wondering.
There, in a "To Our Readers" message from Managing Editor Richard Stengel, was an unnecessary justification of its cover subject ("We first put him on the cover in 1982 for a story about what we called 'America's risk takers'") followed a few paragraphs later by this Aha! Moment:
"For the first time since the magazine's birth in 1923, we will soon be delivering the entire contents of TIME to paying customers in a radically different way: as a self-contained application that you can download to the iPad."
Hmmmm...
People more cynical than I may see this as more self-serving product placement than pure news coverage here, or worse yet, an acquiescing throwing in of the towel; a surrendering tribute to the new king and the admittance that print journalism is indeed dead.
But is it?
It's been said that the Internet has changed everything, and it has indeed changed TIME. Sadly, it pains me to say, not for the better. I've been a long-long-time faithful TIME subscriber since my McGill days (that's over a quarter-century), and the magazine's reaction to the 'net has been a slimming down (many fewer ad pages) and a dumbing down (graphs, charts, pictures and textbites have replaced profound, wide-reaching coverage).
But take a look above the border to see how the 'net has changed another newsmag--Canada's Maclean's (that's it at left). Despite the unsexiest title on the magazine rack, Maclean's has responded to the digital age with a series of makeovers, culminating in its most recent which has actually ushered in an INCREASE in pages, an INCREASE in the word-to-picture ration and, subsequently, an INCREASE in the amount of time I spend with the mag...and with its advertisers.
Not only does Maclean's give a comprehensive, in-depth look at what's going on in my homeland, it does a more-than-adequate job in covering the goings-on in TIME's homeland as well (and in homelands all over the globe). In a VERY un-Canadian manner, the magazine is loud, provocative and controversial, wrapping some great writing in hard-sell headlines and eye-popping cover imagery. What's more, Maclean's court jester, Scott Feschuk, is way funnier than TIME's Joel Stein. It's thorough, and thoroughly entertaining, albeit tabloidesque at times. And it's Canadian. Go figure...
It's not happenstance then, that Ken Whyte, the man who oversaw the most recent Maclean's transformation, was recruited to do the same for the moribund Canadian Business (the second-most unsexy magazine title on consumer shelves). The end result there, almost miraculously after just a handful of "new" issues, is a relevant, authoritative read that is every bit as credible as Fortune...but a lot punchier.
The Internet didn't kill Maclean's and Canadian Business it made them better magazines. What's more, their respective web presences (click on the titles in this sentence to see 'em) ain't too shabby, although I suspect there's a new Canadian Biz site in the works, as it currently lags far behind Maclean's in user-friendliness and design.
Now I'm no luddite; I've also been a long-long-time faithful subscriber to Apple. I got my first Mac at the same time I first started having TIME sent to my house every week (I'm actually composing this post on a MacBook Pro). I work in tech and spend way too much of my free time on the Internet. Maybe indeed the bellweather has rung and it's only a matter of time before print journalism goes the way of the washboard.
But until that time comes, don't insult readers with thinly-disguised commercials and fanboy fluff that's so lite that I needed to tether last week's TIME to my desk with fishing wire.
So what did I learn this week?
I learned that you can go down softly, or you can go down swinging.
And if you go down swinging hard enough, chances are you may not go down at all.
