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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?"
I dont
That's ok, I doubt anyone is going to subscribe to your newsletter either.
Well, actual analysis would be worth it.
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
Who waits a week for their news
Slashdotters?
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No, really.
I drank what? -- Socrates
For print (and electronic, for that matter) weeklies, The Week and The Economist offer more than Newsweek/Time/USNAWR ever did.
Those who are more interested in quality coverage with both breadth and depth than a lightweight, but timely response from pundits.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Yeah, and this other periodical, the New York Times? Surely going to fail. I don't need a printed paper telling me what time it is in New York. Even if I lived there, I'd just look at a clock or a watch.
Gets worse though, I was in California a while ago, and they had a newspaper called the "Sacramento Bee." That's just stupid! I wanted the news, not a stinging insect!
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.
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 $1 not to long ago.
Before you go off thinking I'm some kind of right wing Fox news fanatic, I'm not very fond of them for their political bias either.
Yeah, but we do get the same news multiple times, which makes up for that.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Completely off-topic, the logo for today (in Tengwar) is complete gibberish. Whoever prepared it didn't realise that the keyboard layout didn't correspond to QWERTY, and apparently that Tengwar doesn't even map onto the Latin alphabet. Here is the correct orthography for English, and here is an Elvish orthography. Today's logo actually consists of the letters "zh h ch g j wh m". A fitting tribute to Slashdot that garbage from the submitter was posted without any editorial oversight.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Replying to myself: Actually come to think of it, what really did them in was probably stuff like the Huffington Post. Newsweek correctly guessed in the late 1990s that concise, not very cerebral, cribbed-from-somewhere-else summaries of generic news would have a wider audience than "serious" news, and be cheap to produce, too. So they moved in that direction, and it worked for a while. But then blogs happened, and now, why would you pay for Newsweek when the Huffington Post is almost exactly that, but free and updated more often?
It's hard to say it was a bad decision without using hindsight, because I'm not sure I would've predicted it at the time myself, but they picked the niche that was almost the worst possible niche to be in for competing against online news.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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"
Yeah, but we do get the same news multiple times, which makes up for that. ;)
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.