Newsweek Being Stupid (Again)

I was reading Newsweek the other day and something caught my eye. In their weekly "Indignity Index" of all the stupid things people have done over the week, they had some politician in New Jersey who has, according to Newsweek, been attacking his rival's weight by running ads claiming that he "threw his weight around" to get out of a parking ticket. (Sorry about the run-on sentence).

And after talking to one friend who's a writer and another who's a grammar-cop, I determined that, yes, indeed, Newsweek is stupid. Any well-read person knows that "to throw one's weight around" merely means that you're trying to impress people with how influential, important, or well-known you are. But no editor at Newsweek could even run a Google search on that particular idiom. I mean, for real?

It's one thing to pretty much lie about being a non-partisan publication, but it's another to just let editing and writing go out the window. Completely.

The End.

Cameras

If you know me, you know I like to take pictures. A lot. If you don't know me, you might have gathered that from all the pictures on this blog. I have two cameras -- a point and shoot and a digital SLR. And while I don't know how to use all the features on either of those cameras, I can at least take some decent pictures.

That's all to establish that I can operate a camera. Last night at the Keith Urban concert, though, I wanted to take a picture with my camera phone to send a mocking picture to my brother. (He believes that if you actually sell records, you aren't a real artist or something.) But I couldn't figure out how to make the thing zoom. I could take a sepia picture. Or a picture with a different f-stop. I could change the lighting. And the flash. But I couldn't make the stupid phone zoom. I finally figured it out this morning when I played with it more.

My point is, though, that I hate how cell phone companies want everything to be so complicated. It matters more to them that you be able to say that you can take a picture in sepia than it does to actually be able to figure out how to zoom in on something. And that's a problem.

However, the zoom function is now working well and my friend took a picture with her phone so that I could send that mocking text to my brother. Whew.

The Job Hunt

Job hunt going well. Just got a call for one of the "tide-me-over" retail jobs I've applied for. So at least I feel wanted. And inspired to keep looking.

But...what are these people thinking with the copy-and-paste resume nonsense? I've worked really hard to format my resume. And then I have to paste it into a little box on their website and the formatting goes away and I don't know if it'll come back when I hit "submit." So then I try to re-format it. And it looks ugly. Why can't I just attach it?

Le sigh.

Newsweek

Anybody who talks to me on a regular basis knows that I have some serious issues with the new re-designed and re-imagined Newsweek. Serious issues. Their decision to target the "elite" and make the conversation instead of reporting it seems just a tad pretentious to me. And the fact that it now has a blatent liberal agenda (don't try to argue this one) and doesn't admit it just ticks me off. Have a liberal agenda, but at least admit it.

But this week takes the cake. I find it rather ironic that the issue of the magazine that landed in my mailbox the Monday after I was fired was their "The Recession is Over" issue. It's not. I'm here to tell you that even if the economists have decided that the economy has stopped shrinking...people are still hurting. Maybe most of those people are those evil blue collar Republicans who live in the middle of the country (the people that Newsweek's publishers don't want to target); but even some of their "elite" readers are hurting.

Even their follow-up story on Obama mentioning the article talks about their lofty plans:

"Here at NEWSWEEK, we like to think that we help set the

agenda for the national conversation."

Really, Newsweek? Really? Whatever happened to being journalists? To reporting what is happening? Maybe that's why you've had to completely re-design your lay-out to try and get readership up: because you are so busy setting the agenda for the national conversation that you've forgotten that part of setting the agenda is reporting what is actually happening instead of "writing the first draft of the president's speeches."

Maybe try for a little bit of journalism and you won't need to rely on plugs from the Commander in Chief to sell copies of your magazine.

*Note: I only receive Newsweek via a free subscription through my parents' paid subscription. We're about to decide as a family to cancel said subscription.