David Carr posing the not-just-rhetorical question about how far magazines must fall today in the Times is a lot sharper than his rather credulous hoo-ha about those oh-so-“shocking” magazine covers. But where the tailspin of the magazine sector is concerned, the elephant in the room, which the “mainstream” commercial media by and large just does not want to acknowledge, is the drastic decline in content offered.
Remember content?
I give Carr credit: he does venture gingerly where so few dare to tread, pointing out some of Tina Brown’s editorial mistakes at Newsweek—one thing he doesn’t say, and I will, is that her cultural coverage has been abysmal.
But the larger question is: when every magazine reports on the same sliver of topics in basically the same way, what indeed is the point?