On the heels of last year's redesign—the equivalent of a cry for help—Newsweek is up for sale, leading to earnest proclamations that the end of the newsweekly era is upon us. Editor Jon Meacham is scrambling to round up bidders to buy the magazine. In an interview with Jon Stewart, a long-faced Meacham talked about the future of reporting, "in a time when people don't want to pay for news," (here's part 2). An inevitable Meacham backlash is beginning, with media commentators like David Carr, Jack Shafer, and James Fallows piling on the beleaguered editor, while Fishbowl NY rounds up the 5 ways the story is being told.
Recently axed journalists can get a byline this weekend at the 48 Hour Magazine, "Here's how it works: Issue Zero begins May 7th. We'll unveil a theme and you'll have 24 hours to produce and submit your work. We'll take the next 24 to snip, mash, and gild it. The end results will be a shiny website and a beautiful glossy paper magazine." While you brew your coffee and sharpen your pencils in preparation, read an interview with the magazine's masterminds (you'll need to be good at multitasking).
To the lit-minded, Donald Judd's sculptures resemble bookshelves. Perhaps that's why his foundation in Marfa, Texas has spent many hours photographing the late artist's personal library of 13,000 books (including 2,200 duplicates). The result is a digital embalming of Judd's reading preferences, an extravagantly illustrated bibliography, and a portrait of the artist as a book collector.
David Foster Wallace obsessives found David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself to be a too-brief glance at the author, but perked up at a few intriguing mentions of a little-known 1996 Details profile of Wallace. Blogger Craig Fehrman has toiled in the very unwired world of interlibrary loan to unearth the piece and post it on his blog, complete with a reproduction of the "Details-shot" that made Wallace wary of future photographers. The piece was the first to cover Wallace's Infinite Jest, and rightly predicted that the "literary world [would] bow down before him."
