Newsweek To Go Digital-Only In 2013

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?"

Comments

Re:The problem isn't the medium - it's the title

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, actual analysis would be worth it.

Re:The problem isn't the medium - it's the title

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:The problem isn't the medium - it's the title

[Trepidity]

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.