Newsweek is up for sale, after two years of staggering losses. After a redesign hoped to reinvigorate the weekly magazine in the era of internet-speed news delivery, the publication saw declining ad rates, declining circulation, fewer pages and pictures in each issue, much less original reporting, and substantial staff cuts. James Fallows, of the Atlantic, has a great perspective of what place Newsweek holds in the news magazine ecosystem and why an Economist- or Atlantic-like strategy won’t work for the magazine.

The current problems faced by the newsmagazines remind me of an item published on the New York Times’ Paper Cuts blog about the founding of Life magazine, ‘The Show-Book of the World’: Henry Luce’s Life Magazine Prospectus. Of particular note in the prospectus is the second section, which addresses the need for thoughtful visual journalism, and it rings even more true today:

Pictures have become a dynamic power in the Fourth Estate of the Twentieth Century. But, although people demand and get pictures in nearly every periodical; although the gravure section of the New York Times is the section most “read” by the distinguished clientele of that journal; although pictures have made FORTUNE famous; and although the superlatively successful Daily News is commonly regarded as a picture paper…

Nevertheless, people are missing relatively more of what the camera can tell than of what the reporter writes. With more or less success they “follow” the news–i.e. the written news. They scarcely realize how fascinating it can be to “follow” pictures–to be for the first time pictorially well-informed.

For this there are many reasons. Pictures are taken haphazardly. Pictures are published haphazardly. Naturally, therefore, they are looked at haphazardly. Cameramen who use their heads as well as their legs are rare. Rarer still are camera editors. Thus, many a newsworthy picture which can be taken is not taken. Thus, too, only a fraction of the best pictures of widest interest are brought to the attention of any one alert U.S. citizen. And almost nowhere is there any attempt to edit pictures into a coherent story–to make an effective mosaic out of the fragmentary documents which pictures, past and present, are.

The mind guided camera can do a far better job of reporting current events than has been done. And, more than that, it can reveal to us far more explicitly the nature of the dynamic social world in which we live.

-Henry Luce, June 1936 ‘The Show-Book of the World‘

Change a few words here and there, mention the ubiquity of photos on the internet, add a bit about the shift of news reporting from facts to opinion, and Luce’s prospectus could easily describe something missing and much-needed in the current mediascape.

You’ve probably read the news on APE or PDNPulse or elsewhere…Life magazine’s vast photography archive is making its way online with the help of Google. I posted about Life’s digital foray before, but that page remains the same. PDN’s behind-the-scenes article suggests that Life has more up it’s sleeve planned for the Life.com domain. Only 20 percent of the archive is online at the moment, and the remaining 8 million or so mostly-unpublished pictures will be made available in the coming months, according to Google’s blog.

The PDN article, too, delves into some the financial questions behind the site. Time Inc., who are the owners of the Life empire, and Getty hope the portal will drive traffic to the soon to be released Life magazine site and also offer print sales to the general public through print-on-demand service Qoop.com. Hard to say how all of the contracts over the years will affect the final form of the collection, and one wonders whether photographers or their estates are receiving proceeds from the venture (if any proceeds are due). Commenters on APhotoEditor.com’s thread about the endeavor have been wondering whether more business-savvy photographers in the 80s and 90s, who likely didn’t sign work for hire agreements, will be in the collection or not. Interestingly, PDN’s article suggests that the Life archive will not go after bloggers’ and other personal use of the photos.

I’ve also seen comments online wondering why the collection wasn’t incorporated into the vast Flickr Commons (home to the Library of Congress’ huge archive, among others’) project or at least use Flickr’s engine for community annotation and tagging. Presumably, a great deal of the Life archive remains under copyright and, as such, wouldn’t fit into the Flickr Commons model.

Wish I had more time to sift through the Life archive, but in the meantime, here’s W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor and Spanish Village essays, a strange photo of a bowling alley and archery range, covered wagons used in World War I, Salvador Dali, a running surfer, and a dual cigarette holder for lovers.

Life magazine (the insert, not the great publication of yore) had the jump on Saturday Night Live all the way back in 2004 as part of a package on that year’s election. Bill Shapiro, former managing editor of the insert version of Life, explained the shoot:

As the election neared and it was becoming clear that every vote would
matter, we decided to ask a wide range of famous Americans why there were stepping up to the ballot box. We photographed Madeleine Albright, Manny Ramirez, Andre 3000, and Tucker Carlson (who told us, “People vote when they feel threatened. So it’s a good sign, in my view, that half the country doesn’t vote in the presidential election”) among others. Of course, we photographed John McCain and Tina Fey together. He was thrilled to meet her and they got along very well: They had lunch and he gave her an impromptu tour of the Senate building. Makes us wonder if when McCain met Palin for the first time, he said, ‘You know, you remind me of someone…”

And just for good measure, here’s Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on this year’s premiere of SNL, the show’s highest rated debut since 2002. Apparently Sarah Palin liked the parody, too.

This looks interesting.  Seems as though Life magazine will soon be publishing their archive online.  Right now, there’s just a placeholder page with a place to put your email for updates when the site adds content.  From the page: “Whatever you want to look at, whether it happened an hour ago, a century ago, or any time in between, you’ll be able to find it here quickly, easily, and for free.”  Sounds great to me.  (via APhotoEditor.com)Bonus fact: the first cover of Life (below) was shot in Montana by a female photographer, Margaret Bourke-White (wikipedia bio, some pictures).  While a couple of notable female photographers come to mind from that era, Dorothea Lange, for instance, I’d imagine the field of photojournalism back then was dominated by men back then even more so than today; makes me happy to think that beginning of the most important magazine in the history of photography was shot by Margaret Bourke-White.