I went straight to the meat, though, and read three of the cover stories. Here’s how it played out.

The issue has Alexander Ovechkin on the cover, the ugliest man in sports. I say that because he’s lost one tooth that we know of, also because at least two girls I know have huge crushes on him, and I don’t get it.

In any case, he’s the Caps’ saving grace, and therefore mine. (He’s amazing! I love him.) And the article is pretty fun, lots of play with comparisons to the presidential campaign. Some of them are pretty stupid though:

“Ovechkin could carry himself like some hockier-than-thou arugula-eater, but when he was asked for an autograph by a fan named Phil, he signed it ‘To Fill.’”

So there’s that. The photo spread is especially good, with Laich, Backstrom, and Green (I think, I don’t have it in front of me) as secret service guys, and Boudreau stepping on to Marine 1.

Here’s my favorite part of the piece:

Every leader needs a climactic story point that illustrates his character. For John McCain, it’s his time in a POW camp; for Barack Obama, it’s his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. For Ovechkin, it’s a game in Pittsburgh last season when he took a skate to the leg and left the Igloo with a six-inch gash. None of the Caps would have blamed him for returning to DC to heal, but Ovechkin traveled with the team to Ottawa and played two nights later, scoring four goals and an assist in an 8-6 win. “Every time he moved, the stitches opened,” says Boudreau. “And he played through it.” Fans may remember the ass-over-teakettle goal he netted in a 6-1 win over Phoenix in 2006, but Caps officials cherish that cold night in Ottawa when their leader proved he could be counted on when needed most.

We’re taking the Cup this season.

Other stories I had time to read were less successful.

One writer followed USF pass-rusher George Selvie around for the day, going bite for bite with his 7,000 calorie-a-day diet. It was an OK read, but the profile lacked heart and could have been funnier. Still, it had some good parts.

“I’ll go get you a burger,” Twana offers, smiling. Then she corrects herself. “I’ll go get y’all burgers.” Oh, that ain’t right. Sweating again, I burp, bend over and cough. “You all right?” Selvie asks. I make a noise of affirmation. He’s not so sure. “You look like one of those offensive linemen right before they throw up.”

Gluttony can be pretty funny (like when Kenny vs. Spenny does it), but I feel like the writer never bought in on this piece. He could have taken it further.

I only read one more article. It answered a question I’ve been asking everyone within earshot: “Why isn’t world’s strongest man the most popular thing ever?”

From Steve MacDonald, America’s strongest man:

“They didn’t even print a line in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette when I won,” he says. Figures, since the 80 or so professional strongmen walking America’s streets disguise themselves as something else. Derek Poundstone, America’s Strongest Man of 2007, is a Connecticut cop. Jason Kristal, 2008’s titleholder, works at a California nutritional-supplement company. “Strongmen in Eastern Europe are national celebrities,” MacDonald says. “Here…”

Strong man competitions have small cash prizes, and steroids are an unspoken rule. When not competing, MacDonald owns a bar in Pittsburgh, where he’s just a regular, if strong, guy.

This article had a lot more heart, it’s a good read.

Overall, though, the magazine was just OK. I didn’t have a lot of time to get deep into it, but from flipping through it and reading those articles, I’m not rushing out to buy a subscription, either. Unless they keep putting Ovie on the cover.

They all turned out to be good choices! All were interesting, all deserve remark:

Psychology Today

Psychology Today Oct. 08

After I bought my magazines Friday I sat down in the book store and read Psychology Today cover to cover. Granted, I couldn’t exactly go home for about an hour, but when I’ve just bought three magazines, it’s rare for me to stick with one without flipping around or picking up another of my purchases.

The cover story, “Accounting for Taste,” looked at how “your choices in art, music, everything else speak volumes about you.” It’s almost in the vein of this study, about how music preferences predict personality, but the Psych Today article focuses more on how the range of your tastes communicates your personality.

The Insights section includes an interview with typographer Matthew Carter (not online, from what I can tell), and directions on how to tell a good story ( I forget to breathe and to listen, apparently).

The other standout articles were selections from George Carlin’s final interview (full interview here), and an interview with a panel of comics about what’s funny.  Carlin’s interview was insightful, funny, and sad, as expected, and the panel interview was pretty good, except for the cartoon editor of the New Yorker, who dominated the panel with references to the New Yorker.

MAD

MAD Sept. 08

MAD magazine has Alfred E. Obama all dolled up like he’s at a rally this month. The sign he’s holding sports the “Yes We Can’t” campaign logo. It’s just the opposite of Barack Obama!

I bought it for the charming cover, hoping to find some party-pooping political commentary, or at least a joke about John McCain’s age. I got the latter at least.

Two fake movie posters, advertising The 46-Year-Old Political Virgin and No Country For Old Man, were all that I got covering the election.

But! I got to read Planet Tad! again. Planet Tad is a fake blog written by a teenaged kid, always a few laughs.

Also, Amy, by Amy Winehouse (from the Crack is AACK! Dept.). Series of strips in the style of Cathy, only with Amy Winehouse as the hero.

I never really enjoyed the MAD Movie Satires, so I skipped “Inadiaper Jones and the Kingdom of the Creative Dry Spell” and “The Chronic-ills of Yawnia — Prince of Thespian.”

Esquire

Esquire Oct. 08

I picked up the new Esquire with the e-ink cover people’ve been talking about. It does have e-ink in it and it really does blink, and it is kinda annoying sitting on you’re desk if you’re trying to write.

This issue is Esquire’s 75th anniversary edition, featuring “The 75 Most Important People of the 21st Century.”

The issue is conceptually odd, it’s not quite about the future, definitely not about the past, and works really hard not to be about the present. The essay justifying the issue argues that the 21st century is beginning now, as the “Bush/Clinton/Bush dynamic has petered out” and Bill Gates leaves Microsoft. Now is the time the people who will define the 21st Century are getting into place.

Yet it all has a retro-vibe to it. The profiles of the most influential include behemoths who are already at the top of their fields. Even admitting that most of the picks are going to be wrong, they’re not going much out on a limb. Also, the “World’s First E-Ink Cover” evokes a 80’s LCD clock incessantly flashing 12:00. But this time it’s on a magazine, I guess.

So I’m unconvinced so far. But it’s a big magazine and I haven’t gotten through it all yet.

One thing that did stand out, though, was the interview with Rupert Murdoch. As I try to work out in my head what newspapers should be doing, Murdoch is beginning to make more and more sense. He’s a smart guy, I’m going to read more about him.

I had been into videogames for a few years, after I got my first Game Players, my love for videogames would quickly become second to my love for videogame magazines.

And I found it! That first one had been sitting in my basement in a box for years and years. And then I scanned it.

All these pictures link to large image files so you can enjoy the scans as much as I can enjoy the mag in real life. Sorry for the size.

Anyway, July, 1995, Issue 73 was a pretty great issue in general, right at the dawn of a new generation of consoles. Unveiling the PlayStation, first look at Nintendo’s Ultra 64, Diddy Kong and Fulgore down there in the corner representing SNES, and who I think is Mondo from Toshinden blasting the PlayStation. And Earthworm Jim 2!

Contents

The crowd-sourced encyclopedia of record, Wikipedia, calls Game Players zany, wacky, and crazy. The magazine’s page layout was a mix of MTV and a strobe light made of knives, the Grunge was palpable, the humor juvenile, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

E3 had just wrapped up when this issue came out, and without blogs there was not much other way to get gaming news until the magazines came out (imagine!). Game Players wouldn’t have a website to call its own for another six months.

Letters

Letters were always my favorite part of Game Players. I didn’t quite understand the STD jokes, but they said damn! And hey, jokes about monkeys and violence! Actually, in the Game Ideas section of this issue (page four below), the guy’s idea for a game called Violence is pretty close to what GTA III turned out to be.

What I never got, even back then, was the Connections section, where kids write in to ask for pen pals.  Why would I want to write a letter to someone about Sonic? Plus, printing the names and addresses of eleven-year-olds would not fly nowadays.

And some of these just sound creepy:

I’m 11 years old and love animals. I own a Sega and a SNES. Any age will do.

-Sam

Thanks Sam.

These pages were usually the most enjoyable read of the magazine. Sorry for the missing top part on page two, I must have cut something out for a poster I made at some point.

Hit Lists

Top X lists are always fun snapshots of history. They’d usually drew the first gasp of my reading of Game Players, as some Nintendo game would be at or too close to the top for my taste. They never had the Genesis or PlayStation games I was playing where I wanted them to be. Also, I hated Nintendo (though we’re cool now).

Info Trak

Info Trak I didn’t pay too much attention to, I wanted to get to the reviews! But this is a gem: after E3 ‘05, Game Players reports the delay of Nintendo’s Ultra 64 (later to become the Nintendo 64) and the early release of the Sega Saturn.

The extra development time they refer to in the article turns out to be a good move by Nintendo, as Mario 64 becomes one of the most lauded games ever. Also, Nintendo at this point has a fanbase so rabid and loyal that they’ll easily wait a few more months for the new Nintendo console. Back then things were serious, it was a battle.

Sega, on the other hand, pushes the Saturn out more than three months early, leaving many developers behind. They never really get the game makers back on track, and everyone jumps ship to Nintendo or Sony.

So here, on one page, the disappointment that turns out to be a big boost for Nintendo, and the beginning of the end of Sega as a console maker.

Next time, (in Memories of Game Players, 2), I’ll have the cover story, the unveiling of the PlayStation! Also reviews, previews, and codes. It’s pretty funny in hindsight reading reviews raving about PlayStation graphics. But they were good! They were..

Anyway,

You may remember when I began this blog, well I reached the next milestone last week when I was without Internet.

In other news, back in March I wrote on an Atlantic article covering the paparazzi following Britney Spears.  The numbers have come in, and it looks like the issue bombed on the stands.  From Folio Mag:

“The Britney cover tanked, according to figures submitted by the Atlantic to the Audit Bureau of Circulations Rapid Report filing system late last month. The magazine sold approximately 24,000 copies at the newsstand, some 21,000 less than March and nearly 30,000 less than its January/February issue.”

So does this answer my question, are paparazzi the future of newsgathering? You could say that Atlantic readers aren’t interested in the sensationalism surrounding the Britney Spears media and are looking for something a little more in-depth and thoughtful, but look at these other recent covers (from the May and March issues):

Maybe Atlantic readers are just drawn by other kinds of sensationalism.

While recent controversy over the Miley Cyrus photos has been palpable, how’d it do for the magazine’s bottom line? Silicon Alley Insider has the details:

“The floodgates opened on Monday, when the site also threw up a photo shoot video it had been planning on saving for later in the week. By the end of the day the VF.com had racked up 1.8 million unique visitors (it normally gets between 20,000 and 40,000) and a staggering 17 million page views.”

Somewhere in between the 34 million pageviews of the Lohan photos and the 2.3 million pageviews of the Cruise video I talked about here, the Cyrus photos seem to have made an impression. But I wonder how much money that means?

Anyway, SAI has a pretty funny photo from the shoot. I like the dour dude doing Miley’s hair.

Also, Portfolio’s Mixed Media has a neat post today on a related subject: as a magazine editor, should you be trying to find the next big thing, or just reinforce the major celebrity? The post also touches on the Cyrus photoshoot.

David Samuels has a pretty expansive article in this month’s Atlantic where he follows a team of the paparazzi that keep the Britney beat and recounts how modern entertainment news came to be.

While I don’t agree that the paparazzi have become “one of the most powerful and lucrative forces driving the American news-gathering industry,” Samuels points

“…back to March 2002, when a women’s magazine editor named Bonnie Fuller took over a Wenner Media property called Us Weekly, which had drifted along since its founding in 1977 as a rival to the fantastically successful People magazine franchise. What Fuller brought to Us was a keen understanding of her audience. ‘Every day, we’d look at tons of pictures that came in and lay them all out on a conference table,’ Fuller remembers. ‘And what was interesting to me was to look at celebrities going to the dry cleaners and pumping gas. I loved looking at these pictures of celebrities who were just like us.’”

Now celebrity photographers bring in tons of money, but with the focus on celebrities in their normal lives rather than in salacious situations, the paparazzi teams have become larger and more ubiquitous. Also, however, more news agencies have begun buying the pictures. Photo agency X17 rode this trend to the top.

“X17 licenses its pictures to celebrity skin magazines like Us Weekly, People, Life & Style, and In Touch and their associated websites; to celebrity-oriented television programs like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, and Extra; as well as to newspapers and magazines in England, Australia, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Israel, Dubai, and dozens of other countries; to major television news networks like CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and nearly everyone else in the media business who needs pictures and video clips of Paris Hilton’s arrest or Brad and Angelina’s kids or Britney’s latest courtroom drama, which is to say nearly every major news outlet on the planet.”

This has happened in part because exclusives got too expensive:

“The front-of-the-book snapshots in People and Us cost $50,000 to $75,000 per issue, to say nothing of the attention-grabbing exclusive photo-features on Brad and Jen’s divorce or the latest Friends wedding, which averaged in the low-to-mid six figures. When the spending became impossible to sustain, the magazines slashed their photo budgets and stopped buying exclusives. The larger photo agencies like X17 and Bauer-Griffin then found that they could make even more money by selling a single set of pictures 15 or 20 times over, to eight or 10 magazines, five or six television programs, and websites. And so the industrial phase of paparazzi production was born.”

This reminds me of the industrial phase of news production that there’s been some discussion of lately. With local, and even national papers running more and more wire stories, papers are losing their identities. Part of this is because of budget constraints, but also it seems that news has gotten so fast that if you don’t get the story first, it’s not worth getting at all.

TMZ.com editor Harvey Levin has a different opinion, though. From the Atlantic story:

“[TMZ.com] is owned by the giant media conglomerate Time Warner and edited by a pixieish attorney and former TV producer named Harvey Levin. ‘It’s old-fashioned journalism,’ Levin says of the way that celebrity websites gather news. He suggests that the kind of aggressive Web-based coverage that TMZ and other prominent sites have pioneered has obvious applications beyond the world of celebrity, in areas like politics and sports. ‘I see lots of opportunities,’ he says.”

Maybe this divide highlights the difference between photojournalism and reporting. With photos you only get one shot. If you miss it as it happens, you miss the story and you never get a second chance. Writers, however, can go back, find more sources, ask more questions, and get deeper into the story.

The celebrity photojournalism industry has become industrial, with “gangs of immigrant kids with digital cameras purchased on credit from Best Buy [doing] the work of the heroic lone photographers who once lay in wait with telephoto lenses, stalking Jackie O,” according to “traditional Hollywood paparazzi.” But are we ready to have print journalism do the same?

Will our demand for fresh news become so immediate that once an event is over it’s considered old news? I hope not. Having time to reflect before publishing a story can do nothing but improve the story.

Photographers envy writers for the time (however short) they have to polish a story, but now those on the front lines are finding that sometimes you do get a second chance:

“X17’s photographers say that Britney Spears frequently comments on the pictures they post on their website. They also suggest that the pop star sometimes goes out a day or two later and restages unflattering shots. ‘Forever, she has been in on the joke,’ says Harvey Levin of TMZ. ‘She has also been severely mentally ill for a while.’”

Turns out, to be a beat reporter you gotta be pretty friendly with those you cover to get the scoops. From the article:

“Just after the New Year, [the Loose Lips column] submitted a records request for all e-mails sent to Washington Post employees from high-level mayoral aides and communications staffers during 2007. Call it the Year of Scooping Effortlessly.”

Later

“About an hour after sending word of his politicking at the editorial board, Nakamura e-mailed [Fenty's communications director Carrie] Brooks again, this time asking for ‘an acceptable way for us to write a story that rules crew out’—indicating that he already had knowledge from the mayor’s office that Crew was out of the picture.”

The whole article is a good read and gives an interesting inside view of how journalists and their subjects co-exist in a city like DC.

This cool story in Forbes tells the business repercussions:

“For a site that’s averaged around a million page views a day lately, the results were stunning. NYmag.com recorded a total of more than 40 million page views Monday and Tuesday, more than 34 million of which came from the Lohan portfolio, [NY Mag spokesman Lauren] Starke said.”

That translated into about $500,000 over two days from banner advertisements, or “about as much revenue per day from its online slideshow as it would from four $64,500 full-page color ads in its print edition.”

That’s pretty amazing. Shows just how out-of-control popular celebrity news nowadays.

Reminds me of Gawker bravely hosting the Tom Cruise Scientology video in the face of litigation, clocking an easy 2.3 million pageviews. From NY Times:

“Some former Gawker bloggers have criticized a new compensation system that on top of a base rate pays $7.50 for every 1,000 views that posts generate. If one of [Gawker editor Nick] Denton’s bloggers had posted the Tom Cruise video, his or her haul thus far would be more than $17,000.”

These are all impressive numbers, but where does the journalism fit in?

Well, as you may have heard, newspapers have been on the downs recently, as circulation has been falling along with advertising revenue. These big paydays have surely caught the eyes of some editors looking to get their websites making money.

Will newspapers be able to break these sensational stories before TMZ? Who knows, but it’ll be interesting to see how these big paydays entice editors.

Personally? I think they should be focusing on the long tail, but we’ll see how that works out.

Forbes ends with a disturbing thought:
“Hmm. Makes one wonder: What’s Britney up to these days?”

While the redesign is, as Bloomberg points out, basically a grab for more ad revenue (isn’t everything, though?), it will ultimately not bring in the fresh young business types (or ad revenue) they’re looking for if the new style isn’t more interesting and helpful than the old magazine, or, more importantly, more interesting than BusinessWeek’s and competing websites.

So, is it? I gave BusinessWeek a week with the new design to get the kinks out and picked up the Oct. 29th issue to see if this is something other magazines should try out.

First off, typography-, layout-, color-wise, I like it. I’m not an expert on those things, but it all looked clean and modern and cool to me. Very minimalistic, very easy to read. Anyway, onto the content!

The Business Week

The first section of the magazine, even before the masthead, is a new section called “The Business Week,” a four page section of about twenty short news blurbs. Most of them have references at the bottom, either to other pages in the issue, a generic businessweek.com/magazine url, or to totally different publications. I don’t like this section very much.

The problem is that the blurbs take the style of a blog post, summarizing a bunch stories down to their essences, but they fail at the “what next?” question. News blogs work so well because you can basically preview a story and if you’re interested in it you click the link and you have an entire article or website to delve deeper into. In The Business Week you can either read the article later in the issue, which makes the blurb a glorified table of contents, or go to the landing page/news blog at businessweek.com/magazine, which is a pain, having to switch mediums, or you can go to a totally other publication, as when, after a summary titled “‘Friend’ of the Court,” it directs you to the Oct. 15 edition of The National Law Journal. While I recognize the referents to a blog post, I don’t think they translate well to the print medium.

Summaries like this work in magazines like Maxim when you’re talking about guys who accidentally set their houses/pets/friends on fire — stories you don’t have to know more about after you’ve gotten the punchline — but with real news, and especially with business news, there needs to be the promise of something more in-depth.

BTW

BTW is the short blurb section that works well in the new BusinessWeek. It’s interesting, light and quirky. After reading a whole paragraph about someone selling Stalin’s secret police chief’s train car, I don’t really care anymore. And it’s only one page front and back!

Facetime

Facetime, written by Maria Bartiromo — anchor of CNBC’s Closing Bell — is what magazines are about. Her interview of U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is one of the highlights of the issue.

One thing magazines are good at doing is using their position as a magazine to get interviews with people in power. Websites just don’t have the name recognition with these people’s handlers to get them to agree to interviews, so I like that BusinessWeek is leveraging the respect that print has in the popular mindset to sit down with the treasury secretary.

The problem is, though, how much longer will this last? In the next ten — maybe five — years people are going to start realizing that popular websites can be just as legitimate as any print publication, and print won’t have the upper hand anymore in getting to talk to these people. Once a handful of original news websites begin to stand out from the rest in the popular consciousness, magazines will have a harder time getting these people to sit down. (Is it already happening with TMZ on the entertainment beat?)

In Depth

I also love the In Depth section. Magazines have the resources, and the reader’s attention span, to print these long analysis pieces. I only wish there were more than three of them each issue.

Links

Not really a section of the magazine, links are small pullout asides where BusinessWeek highlights what other news sources are reporting about any given story. They succeed at giving alternate perspectives to stories and answering the questions, “How are other sources reporting this story?” and “What isn’t considered in this story that may be important?” Links was a good addition.

Feedback

Feedback is another section of the magazine I don’t like, especially since it was more or less botched this week. The problem with print deadlines is that when Apple announces it’s going to open the iPhone to third-party developers on a Wednesday, your section about how you won’t buy an iPhone because it’s not open to third-party developers goes out the window.

The part of the Feedback section I dislike is not the letters to the editor, but the section where they print comments from BusinessWeek online. In this case they’re comments to a column about not wanting to buy an iPhone. I don’t know whether it’s that I’m not used to seeing web comments in a print medium (I’m not) or that I’m not convinced of the legitimacy of web comments (I’m not), but the comments BusinessWeek chose here seem like a pretty standard cross-section of stupid Internet comments. They range from the totally off-topic, to the fanboy (“you will be uncool [without an iPhone]“) to the unbearably harsh (“I was given [an iPhone] for my birthday and had the person return it. A great gift, but no thank you.”).

Comments have worked hard to eke out their space on the Internet, and I’d rather they stay there if the best they can find on the BusinessWeek site is this stuff.

In all, though, I like the new BusinessWeek. The missteps seem to be when the redesigners took the charge to make the magazine more “webby” too literally. There are ways in which magazines are better than the web, and instead of trying to bridge the gap between magazine and website, they should have tried to emphasize what makes magazines different and great.

I’m curious to see the next time a major magazine redesigns and how they approach it. Taking visual design cues from the web is great — the most exciting visual design is going on online nowadays — but I hope they hold back from taking content cues from the Internet. There are good reasons the separate mediums have evolved how they have.