Slow your roll

On "Weekend Update", instant analysis, and why America needs more old-school literary magazines

The quailty of content on Saturday Night Live has ebbed and flowed with the times, but other than the cold open and the guest host monologue, no feature has come to the rescue of an episode more often than "Weekend Update". Sketches can be about anything (and often are), but "Weekend Update" is constrained by the news of the week. Anything older feels dated.

■ The constraint often works. Whereas the monologues on the Monday through Friday late-night shows are often trite or predictable, having all week for a team of writers to refine the content helps to sharpen the wit and make it consistently the first- or second-most-rewatched segment of the show. It's not always good, but it's generally much better-watched than nightly monologues written mainly about the same news items.

■ It isn't hard to find breathless but serious commentary and analysis about the news. The torrent is often too much for anyone to digest and remain of sound mind. If, after 50 years, "Weekend Update" has a lesson for the real news, it is that the American media landscape is in need of something not intuitively obvious: More mass-market literary magazines. Or, to be more precise, more outlets aiming to reach a broad audience, devoted to a restrained frequency of publication, and interested in ideas more than individual people or instantaneous events.

■ A big part of publishing survival seems to have pivoted towards having more to say, more often: What used to be the Atlantic Monthly is now very much a daily publication rivaling the country's newspapers of record (literally even recruiting journalists directly away from the Washington Post). Much the same could be said for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, which are not always quite CNN-like in their coverage of breaking news, but which no longer see fit to wait.

■ If even those with access to the best information-gathering tools in the world still can't refrain from speculation in light of news events, perhaps that is a sign our social appetite for instant commentary has outpaced what's really good for us. "Weekend Update" proves that people are willing to wait a week for a good laugh about the news. We could use a diverse array of editorial voices to prove that we're willing to wait a week for good insights into the news. Impatience hasn't paid off that well up to now, and there are no signs the news will abate a week, a month, or a year from now.