Category: Journalism

Newsweek Goes Digital Only

This week, Newsweek announced that the final print edition of the 80 year-old magazine would appear this coming December 31.  This site launched with an interview with Newsweek veteran Christopher Dickey, who writes this morning, “Digital does not mean dead.  Far from it.” Read his post on Shadowland Journal.

I remember the proclamation “paper is dead” being echoed almost immediately after we tried email for the first time.  While that prediction didn’t exactly hold true, one could imagine that the print component of news organizations would inevitably become a cost that was out of synch with the way most people would consume news.  My hope is that readers continue to place value on the real investment these organizations make in experienced professionals who do the investigation and reporting. Above all, as the digital world has exploded the notion how we define news, these professionals, regardless of the tools they employ, maintain traditional standards that must be preserved.

Best of luck to the men and women of Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

Journalism in the Digital Age with Christopher Dickey (Podcast)

Christopher Dickey has been a writer and reporter for nearly 40 years. He is the Paris Bureau Chief and Middle East Regional Editor for Newsweek Magazine and The Daily Beast. He has worked for The Washington Post and written for several other publications including Vanity Fair,  The New Yorker, and Foreign Affairs.  He is a frequent commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR as well as other radio and television networks worldwide. Dickey is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is arguably one of the world’s non-military experts on terrorism and counter-terrorism.

The author of six books, Dickey’s most recent non-fiction work, Securing the City, details the transformation of the NYPD into the world’s “gold standard” of counter-terrorism operations in the wake of 9/11.  His other books include  The Sleeper and Innocent Blood, both novels; Summer of Deliverance, a memoir of his father, the poet James Dickey; Expats, an account of foreigners living in the Arab world; and his first non-fiction work, With the Contras:  A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua, published in 1986.

With a career that begins well before public use of the Web, Dickey is an old-school journalist who fully embraces the flexibility and editorial potential of new and social media.  His Shadowland Journal blog provides supplementary content corresponding to his columns on terrorism, security, and fanaticism that appear in Newsweek and The Daily Beast; he is an avid user of Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. Dickey is among an elite group of journalists I recommend following for anyone who wants to dig below the headlines.  Visit Christopher Dickey’s website.