Newsweek To Go Digital-Only In 2013 110
Tony Isaac writes "Newsweek has announced that it will cease print publication at the end of the year, going all-digital. The new digital edition will still be based on a subscription model. Who will be next?"
Re:The problem isn't the medium - it's the title (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, actual analysis would be worth it.
Re:The problem isn't the medium - it's the title (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all weekly news magazines are doing horribly. The Economist and the New Yorker are both doing fairly well, for somewhat different reasons (New Yorker focuses on long-form journalism, The Economist on concise analytical journalism). I think Newsweek basically gambled the wrong way. I used to subscribe to it in the 1990s, but eventually dropped it as they went in a more pop-news direction. They probably thought that was a good move to broaden their audience, but it left them in a position where it's not clear why you'd read Newsweek rather than any other somewhat trashy news source.
Damn! (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been a Newsweek subscriber my entire literate life (I started reading it in middle school 20 years ago). While some of the layout and editorial changes over the last few years have been a bit jarring, I've always found Newsweek to be a great balance of depth and breadth in its reporting. I really like the weekly format as it allows the opportunity to read and overview of the news that is actually important rather than being overwhelmed by a stream of minute-to-minute trending headlines.
Any recommendations for a replacement weekly?
Re:The problem isn't the medium - it's the title (Score:2, Insightful)
Not all weekly news magazines are doing horribly. The Economist and the New Yorker are both doing fairly well
In fairness, The Economist and (IMO, to a lesser extent) the New Yorker aren't general gossip rags unfit for use even as birdcage liner.
Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
Newsweek ceased being relevant when they became decidedly politically slanted decades ago. They became the liberal version of Fox news, reliable only for a guaranteed political slant. Nice that they are getting rid of the dead tree edition, but the reality is that their subscription base has been plummeting for years.
Changing the distribution form isn't going to change the reason people stopped reading them. Until they fix their blatant political bias this is nothing more than a stop gap between them and the dust bin of history. I predict they become little more than another blogger site within 3 years or so. This is the same company that was sold for a $1 not to long ago.
Before you go off thinking I'm some kind of right wing Fox news fanatic, I'm not very fond of them for their political bias either.
Re:The problem isn't the medium - it's the title (Score:5, Insightful)
Replying to myself: Actually come to think of it, what really did them in was probably stuff like the Huffington Post. Newsweek correctly guessed in the late 1990s that concise, not very cerebral, cribbed-from-somewhere-else summaries of generic news would have a wider audience than "serious" news, and be cheap to produce, too. So they moved in that direction, and it worked for a while. But then blogs happened, and now, why would you pay for Newsweek when the Huffington Post is almost exactly that, but free and updated more often?
It's hard to say it was a bad decision without using hindsight, because I'm not sure I would've predicted it at the time myself, but they picked the niche that was almost the worst possible niche to be in for competing against online news.
I hope they... (Score:4, Insightful)
Use the Scientific American model of a reasonable single price for digital subscription with full access to all past editions for let's say 20 years? That would totally rock. The only problem I see here is how they're going to differentiate themselves from free content and news aggregators.
This is one of the things at the heart of the dying newspaper industry. We need a healthy, and independent new industry, because corruption flourishes in the darkness and one of the only things that can prevent this kind of social cancer is a free and independent Fourth Estate.
By the way, the current state of affairs in America, where virtually all sources of news and information are being concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer owners and that information is being shaped by the political and ideological bent of those fewer and fewer owners. It may in fact be the greatest threats to our way of life facing us today. There have been countless recent incidents where the Constitution and its guaranteed civil rights have been virtually decimated and the press should have been screaming its head off, and I see not a printed word nor do I hear a spoken comment. Add to that the growing attempt to turn the internet into a TV channel, and the silence would then be complete. Freedom loving people everywhere need to determine where the good sources of information, and make certain those sources are protected, invested in, and celebrated as heroic forces in a political system that has clearly lost its way. By the way, the whistle blowers and printers of government secrets are heroes and patriots, and we need to protect them the way we protect national treasures.
NewsWEAK (Score:4, Insightful)
No, I won't be buying. I get enough disinformation for free from the Internet, thank you very much.
The problem with NewsWEEK is it's based on a technology where WEEK meant timely.
There's nothing true in Newsweek - the editorials are spins on crass assumptions - all framing, cue and mis-direction.
Who's next? Who cares. I used to rifle through this tripe, while waiting before I got my teeth cleaned. I'm afraid I haven't bothered that for years now - since the browser showed on my phone, 5-6 years ago.
Re:Off-topic: today's logo (Score:4, Insightful)
Tolkien was an Oxford professor of linguistics. Calling him a "language nerd" is like calling Stephen Hawking a "physics nerd." He was a language *professional*.