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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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