In Praise of Newsweek’s ‘The District’

To be a fly on the wall at Newsweek. I wish I was present when the idea was first pitched to the editors. For a mainstream media outlet—an established weekly print magazine at that—to produce content it describes as “video satire,” is a refreshing sign of innovation to this young producer.

Newsweek‘s The District is a remarkable feat of journalism. It’s a notable show because it does what many journalists—regardless of their medium—struggle to do: it makes important news interesting.  It turns political actors into New Media characters.  And though critics may point out the aburdity of the onscreen Obama using teenage euphanisms and the awkward eye-contact that saturates each episode, The District presents politicking as a drama the layperson can relate with.

This may be the twenty-something in me saying this, but I find the show both entertaining and informing. (Actually, the twenty-something in me is saying: Man, this show is pretty sweet.) And that may be the whole point.

By borrowing heavily from the styles of popular MTV programs like Laguna Beach, The Hills, and The City, Newsweek’s program seems to favor a very specific demographic in its potential audience. And what an audience. The season four finale of The Hills averaged 2.6 million viewers.

To understand The District, one must first understand The Hills. When describing reality-esque format of The Hills, Wikipedia, everyone’s favorite scholarly resource, noted:

It differs from the usual reality show in that it is rather structured as a traditional narrative (seen more commonly in fictionalized television dramas or soap operas) than a straightforward observant documentary.

While The Hills, the most successful of the three MTV programs named here, can be described as life imitating art imitating life, The District is breaking ground by carving an art reporting life nitch.

(One could argue that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report blazed this trail ages ago.)

And by reusing the stock footage from the prior week, it seems the team at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive is able to keep the project’s costs low, but the production quality realitively high.

For instance, look at the show’s credits: an executive producer, a video producer, and a voice actor. Only three staffers. And from what I can tell, the team hasn’t incurred many of the traditional expenses of the average video journalist, such as shooting on location. Moreover, they aren’t truly reporting, instead they’re anchoring or narrating. If the producer is smart, they’d repurpose content generated the week prior by Newsweek staffers for their script.

Check out the season finale of The District next Tuesday, 31 March, over at newsweek.com.