By JEREMY W. PETERS
November 13, 2011
It has been one of Newsweek’s signature ventures and a staple of American political journalism since 1984.
Every presidential election season, the magazine detached a small group of reporters from their daily jobs for a year to travel with the presidential candidates and document their every internal triumph and despair — all under the condition that none of it was to be printed until after the election.
Then two days after Election Day, the sum of their reporters’ work would appear in the magazine. But the ambitious undertaking, known inside the magazine simply as “the project,” is no more. Newsweek, bleeding red ink and searching for a fresh identity under new ownership, has decided the project would not go forward this election season.
Explaining the decision to end the series, Edward Felsenthal, executive editor of Newsweek and The Daily Beast, its online partner, cited the quickening speed of the news cycle. In a news environment when scoops are often measured in milliseconds between Twitter posts, fewer news organizations are comfortable waiting to publish the kinds of attention-grabbing anecdotes that they would have once saved for longer articles.
“Sitting on election news felt to us out of place in an era where so much information comes out so fast,” he said. The pace seems measurably faster than even four years ago when many of the most titillating anecdotes about the 2008 campaign were reported in “Game Change” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, a book that did not hit store shelves until January 2010.
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