Newsweek succumbs to ad slippage, will kill print pub Citing "the challenging print advertising environment," Newsweek – which will turn 80 next year – has announced that it is canning its print publication and transforming itself into a single, worldwide digital edition, Newsweek Global. "Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013," wrote The Newsweek Daily …
Does Tina Brown no longer run that, then? And in any case, VF has never been the most serious magazine, nor the one with the least funky covers.
The whole "news magazine" model always was a little odd--get last week's news back, with snark and (if Time) funny syntax. Perhaps the odd thing is that it lasted 80 years, not that it's finished.
Vanity Fair is at least demonstrating that while "stock images and incendiary statements" may not suffice to keep a magazine in print, haughty cattiness will do the job for a while.
And the news magazine is a lot older than Newsweek's 80 years. The Economist has been in print since 1843, and it's still going strong. Personally, I find once-a-week in-depth news reporting to be more than sufficiently current (indeed, I often fall behind on my Economists[1] and periodically have to spend a little while catching up). Few things in the world affect me so immediately that I have to know about them within 24 hours. But perhaps I'm not so jet-settingly cosmopolitan as some.
[1] Yes, I'm aware of its shortcomings. Let's not wander down that path.
For some strange, inexplicable reason, once Tina Brown became editor, Newsweek's coverage of the fashion industry increased greatly... and coverage of just about anything else, including national (US) and world news, declined horribly.
I've been a subscriber since 1978, and it'll be strange to not have it in my mailbox. On the flip side, I feel incredibly intelligent for ignoring their offers: "Renew your subscription now! Before it expires! Only six months left!"
I'd say this is last orders at the Last Chance Saloon for Newsweek; if the publication ever knew what it was for, it's long since forgotten. It's only real remaining saving grace was not being Time magazine - hardly a great achievement. Both magazines have long since had a reputation that they simply did not deserve; poor middle of the road 'wallpaper' journalism, written without much of either knowledge or passion and kept as bland as possible to avoid even mildly upsetting their print advertisers, with the rest having an editorial style designed by a teenage intern in the US state departments "Propaganda for Foreigners" division.
In their day, weekly news magazines really did rule. But that was under editors and owners for whom journalism was the first consideration, not an inconvenience. Even if the format could make a comeback, the staff of Time and Newsweek would not be the people to achieve it. Vanity Fair's comment really does sum it up. Good riddance.
...those thoughts get drowned out in the corporate echo chamber that is the US MSM.
There, fixed it for you. Actually, I'm surprised it took this long for the teabagger trolls to crawl out.
If you really think the US media are "leftist", you're either flat-out spreading disinformation or just living under a goddamn' rock.
To cranks like "Tom 13", pretty much any media outlet in this country is "leftist" if they're so much as a crotch hair to the left of WorldNet Daily.
I used to work for one of Newsweek's printing companies in the early 2000s before that printing company went bust: Newsweek was an "interesting" publication to print as they insisted on the own inbound connection (they couldn't use the 16x2Mbps lines we had in, but wanted their own) which then had to be hooked into their own VLAN to their own equipment (not just routers, but PCs as well) and then to their own VLAN again before joining the rest of the printing company's network.
I suspect their print costs just got too high due to the printing companies saying "Welll, we can handle this case but it's going to cost ya".
They -- and Time -- have been going downhill on a rocket sled since the late '70s, their covers increasingly polluted with sensationalist noise and bland, irrelevant health'n'lifestyle glop. I'd long since taken to calling them "Newsweak".
It certainly didn't help that when cable TV ushered in the 24-hour news cycle, outfits like Time and Newsweak became more and more irrelevant when, by the time they hit the stands, the "news" between their covers could really have been more accurately called "olds".
So, now Newsweak thinks it's going to save itself by putting out a "slab edition" containing the same old bland, irrelevant, pro-corporate horseshit and charging people money to read it. Pardon me while I laugh until I piss myself.
"It certainly didn't help that when cable TV ushered in the 24-hour news cycle, outfits like Time and Newsweak became more and more irrelevant when, by the time they hit the stands, the "news" between their covers could really have been more accurately called "olds"."
Actually, when the 24-hour news cycle hit, I relied even more on newspapers and Newsweek to give me reporting with a bit of perspective - when every item is treated as "Breaking News!!" then no item is treated as uninteresting. Print news does a much better job of sorting that out... unless they stop spending the time and effort to do that, which is what happened at Newsweek.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
