Slashdot Mirror
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?"
The problem with Newsweek isn't the medium - it's the title. Who waits a week for their news, even their analysis anymore?
I dont
That's ok, I doubt anyone is going to subscribe to your newsletter either.
You mean I'll have to read my news on the internet, or my iphone, or my ipad, or my ipod, OH THE HORROR!!!!!
It used to be a good source of info. I remember learning about Alta Vista from Newsweek. Oddly, and if I'm remembering correctly, they were profiling Leslie Nielsen who loved the search engine.
After all, a dead-tree newspaper can be read by multiple people despite having been paid for only once!
As oppose to a digital newspaper, which can be read by millions despite only having been paid for once.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
No, really.
I drank what? -- Socrates
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?
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
I don't dislike print or digital news. There is a place for both in my opinion.
When I fly it is usually realatively short flights, 1-3 hours. Knowing I can't use electronics through half of the flight I just pickup a newspaper or a copy of news week for the trip, I read it on the flight and leave it at the gate for others to read after me. Same with the newspaper at coffee shops, its a media that is comfortable for me, whereas small phone screens or electronic tablet screens really feel foreign still to me.
I had a Kindle Fire for a while but found that wifi coverage really wasn't very good even though I live in a major city. No wifi on the train, or it wasn't working most of the time so I couldn't read the news or it was so slow that I spent half the time loading on congested wifi. Print media is still the way to go in many circumstances, unfortunately the market is shrinking very quickly so it may go the way of betamax, but until then I'm holding on.
What they're forgetting to take into account is who subscribes to Newsweek: Doctors who often have patients waiting for an appointment. Who is going to subscribe to a Newsweek that can't be left out for patients to read while they wait for the doctor to see them?
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.
Completely off-topic, the logo for today (in Tengwar) is complete gibberish. Whoever prepared it didn't realise that the keyboard layout didn't correspond to QWERTY, and apparently that Tengwar doesn't even map onto the Latin alphabet. Here is the correct orthography for English, and here is an Elvish orthography. Today's logo actually consists of the letters "zh h ch g j wh m". A fitting tribute to Slashdot that garbage from the submitter was posted without any editorial oversight.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I believe OMNI was first to go from paper to Internet Only in 1995. It only survived as an Internet magazine for three years.
Are there any magazines that fully made the switch and survived for any length of time?
WIRED backed out of making a full switch.
Anyhow, I miss OMNI. In paper.
"Respectable magazine?" Have you actually read Newsweek in the past, oh, ten years?
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.
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.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Rather than adapt to changing technology, many print magazines opted to cut costs by cheapening the content, and catering to the dumbing down of the public. You don't need to wait for hindsight to know that's a bad idea. I've seen many a restaurant go the same way. Try to cut costs so much that the quality of the food suffers, and end up going out of business even faster as customers run away. US News and World Report tried to replace much news with Top 100 lists. I suppose those are cheaper to produce than real news, but they simply aren't that useful or interesting though they did make a big deal over the Top 100 universities with difficult to credit claims that the schools cared so much about it that they were all striving to improve their rankings in the magazine. Recently, US News went under and moved all their remaining subscribers to Time. I wouldn't be surprised if Time died in the near future.
Another bad idea is screwing with subscription models. Used to be that you'd get a renewal notice. Now, many magazines and newspapers are pushing the highly annoying automatic renewal with of course automatic charges, trotting out very lame and pathetically contrived reasoning that everyone is doing it, it's for our convenience so that we won't miss a single precious issue, and we asked for it, etc. Condescending and insulting. And clingy and desperate. Not qualities that inspire confidence in their journalism. Just this year, Reader's Digest made automatic renewal the default method, though at least it is optional. I quit the local newspaper when they wouldn't offer any subscription that didn't include automatic renewal.
Science News tried a bit better approach. They changed from a weekly to a biweekly to cut postage costs. It's a start, but ultimately, magazines must move entirely online. The cost difference alone dictates this move. But there is more. Online archives are far better than a shelf full of old issues. Much easier to search, and saves hugely on space. Dead tree is dying. Whenever I have moved, one thing that I did not lug with me were magazine collections.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
What are doctors and dentists going to place in their waiting rooms?
A Wi-Fi access point so that people can bring their own netbook or tablet. Afdent in Fort Wayne is already doing this.
Since 90% of Newsweek subscriptions are made by doctors and dentists, in order to have light fluff for their victims to read before another unnecessary procedure, there goes Newsweek.
It's OK, though, Newsweek is one of the most miserable of the so-called news magazines. Light on facts, heavy on the propaganda. I bet Maureen Dowd would fit in great there.
All those issues are from 2009 anyway. All the doctors have to do is save up Newsweek's last issues, and then leave them in waiting rooms forever.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What they're forgetting to take into account is who subscribes to Newsweek: Doctors who often have patients waiting for an appointment. Who is going to subscribe to a Newsweek that can't be left out for patients to read while they wait for the doctor to see them?
The doctors of the future will have stacks of battered old iPad 2's on the table in the waiting area....
All of which will have batteries that no longer hold a charge longer than 10 minutes.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Much more meat rather than sensationalist filler. After just a couple issues you'll be thanking Newsweek for stopping their presses and thus convincing you to move on.