The new Newsweek looks terrible

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The issue fails not just by my measure or by the homeless guy’s but by Brown’s. In her introductory note, she writes that the new Newsweek will be “about filling the gaps left when a story has seemingly passed, or resetting the agenda, or coming up with an insight or synthesis that connects the crackling, confusing digital dots.” Having read the new issue front-to-back, I can report that the gaps remain, the agenda has not shifted, and the crackling, confusing digital dots are still scattered at random on the floor…

The speedy Web, smartphones, and iPads have erased (if it ever existed) any special “path to understanding” that magazines may have once delivered. There’s nothing in this issue of Newsweek, or any other magazine on my local newsstand, that couldn’t be put on the Web. Unless Brown is pretending otherwise for the benefit of a certain Newsweek subscriber in Keokuk, Iowa, who has never seen the World Wide Web, I don’t know why she’d write such silliness.