A Conversation With Mark Coatney, the Man Behind Newsweek’s Tumblr

One of the first major publications to make its presence felt on Tumblr, Newsweek has been one of the pioneers of the social-media/blogging site. Thanks in part to its highly personalized voice, Newsweek.tumblr.com   has collected 6,000 followers. That’s a lot for a Tumblr site, and even more considering hardly any other magazines are playing in the space.

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“A lot of people believe that the only way for a country to get rich, stay rich, and get richer is to burn more carbon fuel. If that’s factually accurate, some people think, then even if global warming is a problem, we won’t address it before there’s a calamity because people are not going to agree to make themselves poorer. It’s easy for me to say that. If you cut my income 10 percent I’d still be in great shape, and my daughter would be all right, and everything would be fine. But you can’t ask people who can’t pay their grocery bills to, in effect, [take a] pay cut to solve this problem.”

- Fmr. President Bill Clinton, on why some problems are just downright hard to solve

(From our ‘Interview Issue’)

(via newsweek)

“Today, finally, after months of carefully massaged messages from the White House, we’re finally seeing the president lay it all on the table. It’s about time. The “now or never” message, which has been true for months, is long overdue, and it’s an enormously effective motivator. But did Obama leave it too late for this pitch? He’s being quickly undercut from an unlikely quarter. Former Governor Howard Dean, a popular figure with progressives—and one with credibility on this issue—told Vermont Public Radio this afternoon that if the Medicare buy-in is removed, then Democrats should ditch Reid’s bill. “This is essentially the collapse of health-care reform in the United States Senate,” Dean said. “Honestly the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill, go back to the House, start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.”

Katie Connolly makes the case for a more activist Obama. (via newsweek)

Thank God!

newsweek:

According to Summers, we’re entering the Golden Age of the Sex Scandal. His evidence:

The evidence in the new generation of sex scandals has been compiled by the protagonists themselves, in the form of text messages, voice mails, IMs, e-mails, and cell-phone pictures that one party, usually the less powerful one, has squirreled away. Digital communications are tough to avoid or erase, and they’re easy to archive as text, audio, or video. Text messages in particular are “the new lipstick on the collar,” says The New York Times, in a piece describing how SMS evidence has driven the Tiger Woods case and everyday divorces alike.

Now, when a former mayor gets into trouble for a relationship with a campaign aide, we get to hear the actual voice mails he left the woman. When a congressman crosses the line with his young pages, we get the  actual transcripts [PDF] of their instant-message conversations. When a married governor decides that an Argentine woman is his soulmate and pretends to be on the Appalachian Trail while he visits her, we get their actual heartfelt e-mails. I don’t know about you, but as a scholar of the tawdry, I find the prospect of working with primary documents exhilarating.