Election Choices

Mercifully, Election Day — and an end to all the snarky campaign banter — is just over a week away. Unlike four years ago, the outcome is in doubt. Barack Obama rode a wave of hope and excitement to the White House in 2008. However, even ardent supporters are muted this time around, and many have abandoned the president altogether.

Obama has failed to deliver on promises to turn the economy around, and just as with many other recent presidential campaigns, this one likely will hinge on how voters believe they will be impacted in their pocketbooks. Despite being in office for four years, Obama continues to blame President Bush, Republican lawmakers and many others for the faltering economy and even escalating deficit. As we’ve seen with the deaths of U.S. embassy personnel Libya, the president refuses to take blame for anything that goes wrong under his watch. A little humility might win him some votes.

Mitt Romney has ridden a wave of anti-Obama sentiment, but has failed to fully capitalize because he still has plenty of sticky issues. By repeating the same lines for three debates he appears robotic. Many see him primarily as a rich businessman-turned-politician out of touch with the problems of common folk. And he is yet another old white guy nominated by the GOP, albeit healthier than his predecessors.

In addition to the economy, the election will be determined by which party better motivates voters to get to the polls. An unenthusiastic base could spell trouble for Obama, if millions decide to skip voting rather than reward him for another four years of mediocrity. For Romney, it will depend on energizing evangelical voters, many of whom would have to ignore their beliefs that Mormonism is an aberrant religion.

I’ve talked to several people who don’t think it matters who is in the White House, although obviously these men paint starkly different portraits of America’s future. I can’t really blame a jaded electorate. The candidates have spent months not so much spelling out what they would do in the next four years, but instead focusing on how to best demean the opponent.

Print Journalism Slide Continues

I’m afraid those of us who make a living from print journalism are deceiving ourselves. The loss of revenue and subscribers continues unabated in an era when most readers don’t want to bother paying for content they think they can find for free on the Internet.

The announcement by Newsweek last week that it would cease publication after 79 years is a case in point. At 1.5 million subscribers, Newsweek certainly has many more readers than a lot of publications going belly up. But the subscriber base has dropped in half in the past seven years and advertising is virtually non-existent. The periodical has been bleeding red ink for years.

But CEO Baba Shetty failed to face reality when he told The Wall Street Journal that Newsweek would gain “hundreds of thousands” of online subscribers at $25 annually during the next year. Currently Newsweek has just 27,000 online-only subscriptions.

Advertisers who shunned the print edition won’t flock to Newsweek’s website. Neither will readers. News has been missing from Newsweek for a long time. Most cover stories these days are first-person opinion pieces with no sources. Newsweek is a shell of its former self, masquerading as a current events resource. 

Nearly all magazines are in financial trouble. My former employer, Christianity Today, last week let go Senior Associate Editor Mark Moring, who had worked for the company for 19 years. I hope the day never comes when CT goes out of business, because it truly provides a clarion voice for the evangelical world.

Pentecostal Evangel, where I now work, isn’t immune from subscriber attrition, although it helps that the magazine is distributed primarily in bulk to churches. Yet not that long ago I had two full-time news writers on staff; now I’m a one-man department.

Magazines must strike a delicate presence between having a web presence with easy-access material combined with marketing their product as unique, valuable and unavailable elsewhere. Our magazine doesn’t put everything online for free that is in the print version, and I think that’s wise.

I rue the day when we have only a few magazines left and professional journalists become obsolete. Our society will be ill-informed if all we have to read are opinion-laced blogs.