With the media world going online, Newsweek is taking the reverse: bring online to print.

courtesy of flickr.com user ask curlyRecently, the publication redid their layout, resulting in a magazine reflecting the aesthetic values of a clean website. On the cover, the Newsweek logo is boxed in as a site header, hovering above one cover story without “Inside:_______” stories listed. Looking past the necessary page ads, the contents section is a simplified navigation bar with four sections: Scope, The Take, Features, and Culture. No accompanying pictures are presented.

The Letters [to the editor] section is presented [not extra-traditionally] as a comments section on a website, with the addition of a graph à la “most popular” site polls, and an In Six Words table inspired by sixwordmemoirs.com.

The short essays are more bloggy than ever: direct responses to specific (often new-media driven) events, with one picture, a clean title, and sub-headers for sub-titles and and bylines. They are not columns, and they are not stories, but…  This can best be seen in the Scope section, which had 12 short blurbs about current affairs similar to theatlantic.com daily pieces, or a Kosmoblog piece about the news. They each have one accompanying picture, with captions inlaid as if an image in a slideshow as opposed to underscored as in a newspaper.

The overarching aesthetic is cleanliness. The print is bold and images are either presented as headers or in an in-text fashion with ample margins. White space is amplified, making the landscape easy on the eyes. Graphs and images, too, are cleaned up, and more of the artwork is done with computers, e.g. Photoshop, than with scanned images done by hand, as seen in the June 22 issue with Mark Wagner’s beautiful dollar bill pieces featured in Fareed Zakaria’s feature piece The Capitalist Manifesto.

Each section i.e. Scope, The Take, has its own content navigation that would otherwise be found in a sidebar. In all column-blogs, page turning is avoided. allowing for pieces to be presented on their own, as opposed to as in other print forms that have readers “turn to page (?!) to continue reading,” as a means to allow other content to be featured closer to the beginning of the paper.

And then I came upon a nifty ad the publication ran for itself. There’s a graphic that depicts world concerns being processed into intelligible strands by a meat grinder. Underneath there is a definition: “news-week / verb : 1. To extract meaning from the mayhem. 2. To make sense out of the daily grind. 3. To render the inscrutable…scrutable.”

If not that it were the intellectual blogosphere! Using publications as active verbs is a new media notion creating a distinction from the passive old. In many aspects, this was an online survival tool: Why should I read something on the Kosmo when I could read it in The Atlantic? Slate? The New Yorker? Etc.? Active verbs outrun nouns like the New York Times, old media, beige four-door sedans, and faux-wood linolium. Its a fight in a 100 corner ring where each opponent has his or her stool, and when the bell rings, you better come out swinging your own punch, or else you’ll get knocked in the teeth.

Theoretically, Newsweek print edition is six days behind the world about which they write. New media is not only running a faster race than old media, but a different race all together, leaving past contenders to hang ‘em up back in the locker room. It’s a question of efficiency. People want their information in the most relevant and clean manner possible, without sacrificing quality. Which makes me question why, for all the pluses of the revamped Newsweek print, their website has to be such an unattractive piece of shit.

Yesterday, President Obama answered questions concerning Father’s Day. He took questions from his political colleagues, friends, and even a select few children. A video on CNN shows one of these children asking the president “how [he] felt when he first became a father”. It took President Obama almost two minutes to answer the question, sputtering half-sentences and run-on clauses with no resolution. Finally, in a characteristic bout of concision, he was able to say “you will do anything for that child”, referring to his first child Malia, born in 1998.

The president tried to zest his obvious lack of articulation with jokes and amusing anecdotes, all of which made his answer that much harder to follow. He turned away from the child who asked the question to address his colleagues and others sitting in the room. They all smiled with good humor.

As I was watching the video I felt an enormous sense of sympathy for the president. His father of course abandoned the Obama family when Barack was only two years old, leaving little for a frame of reference on fatherhood. Although the president’ speech was very much extemporaneous, his lack of articulation speaks to the fact that his experiences are entirely personal; his practical skills at fatherhood, at least biological fatherhood, are grass-roots, begun from the ground up. Father’s Day is probably difficult for all those who have lost a father in one way or another, but for the president to enjoy a Father’s Day with his children, who are much older than two years old, is just a testament to his empathy, to a fantastically mature and totally baseless understanding of pater.

The President’s American experience is typical and atypical. According to Vanessa Grigoriadis, an African-American growing up in Hawaii with an Ivy League education and a white mother is atypical in terms of the “American black experience”. The divorced parent issue however is pretty typical of American families, transcending race, economic standing, and geographical setting. The difference is that President Obama figured out how to be a father without a significant withdrawal-account of his own, no biological understanding of the “father-figure”. So when that child asked the president how he felt when he first became a father, a surge of memories, good and bad, dictated President Obama’s answer.

Tomorrow, President Obama will sign a memorandum which will allot “some benefits” to federal employees engaged in same-sex relationships. This memorandum, in clear violation of the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, will do little to rouse congressional majority, i.e. liberals who don’t really want to stir the pot. Some of the big conservative names may be upset, but in fact, the memorandum will mostly antagonize gays and lesbians, some of whom find it to be a nice gesture, but genuinely ineffective in promoting LGBT rights.

CNN says that some call the president’s memorandum an “olive branch”, but that most feel like he could be doing more. Without trying casting the doomful harbinger so typical of political reporting, it seems as though the president is overextending his reach. Although he has denounced the Defense of Marriage Act in the past, his actions, for the LGBT community, speak louder than his words (e.g. nominating Rick Warren, someone who had previously likened homosexuality to bestiality, to deliver the invocation at the presidential inauguration). Perhaps if Mr. Warren spoke against the LGBT community and contextualized the president within his speech, it would force President Obama to have a meaningful discussion about gay rights, a la Reverend Wright.

The President has become exceedingly critical of the Defense of Marriage Act in the recent days, criticisms sparked by two California-governors-to-be, Mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom and Mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa. Both criticized the act at the commencement of the Los Angeles LGBT Pride Parade on Sunday. President Obama’s memorandum (itself an effective libel against the act) may also propitiate the LGBT community because of the Justice Department’s recent defense of the act. By defending the LGBT community (to whichever degree), the president is showing either his liberal beliefs in programmatic rights or his tenacity in going against the government itself in defense of the people.

I don’t really think the latter is true; I think it’s a façade, albeit an effective one. The former seems a bit shrewder to me. I truly believe that the president believes in equality for all, regardless of sexual orientation, race, or any other exploitable phenotypic trait. However, as has been stated many times over, he simply has too much on his plate. So much, in fact, that his attempts to add more have proved both taxing and ineffective. The LGBT community is actually denouncing the president’s attempts to foment a good relationship between itself and the federal government. To me, there is no clearer indication that something is wrong. Perhaps when we aren’t militarily occupying two countries or trying to find our way out of an economic quagmire, then will the president’s attempts be both meaningful and successful.