October 18, 2012, 8:12 am Newsweek to Cease Print Publication at End of Year By DAVID CARR and CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY NY Times
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/newsweek-will-cease-print-publication-at-end-of-year/?pagewanted=print 1:17 p.m. | Updated Newsweek, the weekly magazine that for decades summarized the news for households across the United States but struggled to maintain relevance in the Internet era, announced on Thursday that it would cease print publication at the end of the year. Tina Brown, founder of the Daily Beast Web site and the driving force behind its merger with Newsweek, announced the move on Thursday in a message on the Daily Beast. "We are announcing this morning an important development at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the United States will be our Dec. 31 issue," Ms. Brown said in a message co-written with Baba Shetty, the recently hired chief executive. The all-digital version of the magazine will be called Newsweek Global and operate on a paid subscription model. The name Newsweek, in spite of its trouble in print, still has value in terms of international licensing, as well as several conferences Ms. Brown has created. Readers and media analysts have been puzzled by some of the covers Ms. Brown had chosen in an effort to distinguish Newsweek from other magazines and make it a talked-about publication again. Last November, she featured a cover story about sex addiction, and in May President Obama was shown wearing a rainbow-colored halo with a headline that read ''The First Gay President.'' But Ms. Brown defends her choice of covers. "The magazine was incredibly moribund when we came in,'' she said in a phone interview Thursday. "It had taken so many knocks. We have been able to bring Newsweek back to relevance. I have always felt that the covers are about a conversation. The covers become a conversation starter." Founded in 1933, Newsweek established a venerable place in the American media landscape, competing ferociously with Time magazine week in and week out to bring news to several million readers. In the pre-Internet era, before a constant stream of real-time information was available, the two magazines were viewed as among the best sources of news and analysis -- an attractive product on the newsstand and a highly anticipated arrival in the mailboxes of subscribers. But as the weekly publication cycle became outdated, both magazines struggled to adapt to the Internet age and establish a digital presence, while facing a decline in advertising and circulation. In 2001, Newsweek had a total paid circulation of 3,158,480, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation. But as of June of this year, circulation had fallen by more than half, to 1,527,157. Losses at the weekly continued to mount even after the sale in 2010 to Sidney Harman, a 92-year-old audio magnate. He bought the property from the Washington Post for a dollar and eventually, with Ms. Brown, merged it with The Daily Beast, the Web site owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp. The future grew grimmer still after Mr. Harman died in the spring of 2011. His heirs had said they would continue to support the ailing weekly, but last summer the family announced it would no longer invest in the magazine. Ms. Brown also says that even with her past experience in magazines -- as editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and the failed Talk magazine -- she had little control over what was happening in the broader industry. "You can not actually change an era of enormous disruptive innovation,'' she said. "No one single person can reverse that trend.'' Losses at the magazine have been reported to be about $40 million a year, and Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC, which owns both The Daily Beast and Newsweek, made it clear he would not underwrite the losses forever. "Our offices have been filled with consultants running around with lists of people, so we knew something was about to happen," said one staff member, who insisted on anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak and was worried about potential layoffs. One of the consultants, the person said, was Jack Griffin, a former head of Time Inc. "Regrettably we anticipate staff reductions and the streamlining of our editorial and business operations both here in the U.S. and internationally," Ms. Brown wrote. The announcement was timed, staff members said, to get ahead of next week's earnings call for IAC, when Mr. Diller was expected to be peppered with questions about Newsweek's losses. In an interview with public radio's Marketplace, Mr. Diller made it clear he was not sentimentalist when it comes to business, saying if one doesn't work out, "Sell it, write it off, go on to the next thing." -- ================================================= George Antunes Voice (713) 743-3923 Associate Professor Fax (713) 743-3927 Political Science Mail: antunes at uh dot edu University of Houston Houston, TX 77204-3011 _______________________________________________ Please be sure to include a URL to the article. Reply to the sender with a "Thank you" if you like this post. _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
