Jon Friedman Finds Way to Make Time Magazine Even More Boring: He Writes About It
If you've got grandparents, you may have heard about Time magazine, a stapled-together collection of pages that tell you what happened last week.
If you read Romenesko, you may have heard about Jon Friedman, the Marketwatch columnist who dispenses conventional wisdom like a child molester dispenses candy.
Today, those two worlds collide.
Friedman turns his eye to Time (we can imagine him pitching it to his long-suffering editor: "Think about it. Newsweeklies. How can they compete with all this new technology? I bet no one's covered that!"). While paying it the compliment of calling it "America's most influential magazine" (which is no doubt true among those whose other reading experiences involve the back of a Metamucil bottle) Friedman notes that Time needs to shake things up, get dangerous, go where the kids are. You know: The Web.
Friedman, whose column photo contains a shit-eating grin that seems to be saying, "Can you believe I'm getting paid for this crap?" goes on to dole out advice that is so 1994 it should come with an accompanying Stone Temple Pilots soundtrack: "It would be so simple for news organizations to provide exclusive content geared only to online readers."
But there's more! As journalist Seth Mnookin notes:
"The American media are missing a good bet to attract greater numbers of readers" by "provid[ing] exclusive content geared only to online readers," he says. What an awesome idea! You mean like having Joe Klein write web-only columns? Or hiring Ana Marie Cox to do the same thing? Or maybe putting Andrew Sullivan's blog online? Oh, wait: time.com already does all of that. To be fair, all of those columns are buried on the upper right-hand side of the magazine's homepage.
Shh, Seth! Next week's column is about how websites need to be easier to navigate if magazines want to pull in older readers.
How Time magazine can stand apart [Marketwatch]
Amazingly, there are some j-school grads who don't have jobs [Seth Mnookin]