Hope four posts isn't too overwhelming...
Circulation is down for newsweeklies (like Time and Newsweek) and up for celebrity gossip magazines (like Us and People). I don't know about you, but it really says something negative about the state of our culture when people would rather read the latest gossip on celebrities rather than becoming informed and educated about events around the world (how can we be effective prayer warriors if we don't know what's going on in the world? how can we effectively reach the nations with the Gospel if we don't know what people are facing throughout the world? for Americans in general: how can we be the informed citizens our Constitution requires if we don't have a clue of events happening not only in America but throughout the world?). Lest you think my britches need to be loosened (which, granted, they may need to be), I do read People. However, I also enjoy reading the newsweeklies and newspapers. I think one can have both, it need not be an either/or thing.
2 comments:
Question: do you think part of that might be because most of the information in the newsweeklies is available on the internet where much of what is important in 'People,' etc. is the pictures and the dieting tips and the quizzes and that is not available online? I used to receive Time Magazine (still my favorite mag - even as liberal as it has become - they have at least two really, really good authors working for them), but, pardon the pun, ran out of time to read it and decided that I could get the same information from fourteen different websites. I don't, and never have, regularly read People; but I can understand the attraction to having that magazine in front of you rather than seeing that on the screen of your computer. As more of the internet newspapers such as the New York Times move to subscription only website management, we may see a renewed interest in the subscription to the paper copies of those and other daily or weekly news media. Then again, people may just get upset that their favorite websites will no longer be available for free and decide not to get any news (although, experience tells me that the news junkies will find their news however they can). I agree with you about the state of our culture, but my final observation on your commentary is this: what these statistics about the circulation rates of Newsweek and Time may be saying rather than only the decline of our culture (although, like I said, I agree with that as well), is that our attention spans are progressively declining. We don't have either 1. the ability or 2. the desire to sit and read the longer articles in those newsweeklies. We would much rather sit and watch CNN or FoxNews and get our news in 30 second sound bites. Speaking of Fox News, and their ilk, I saw the same 15 second video of the fake bomb in DC three times in the space of 5 minutes - my attention span may be short, but my short term memory is not *that* bad!
You may be right about the availability on the internet of articles. However, I've found that not all of the information in the mags are available on the internet.
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