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?"
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$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No, really.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Yeah, and this other periodical, the New York Times? Surely going to fail. I don't need a printed paper telling me what time it is in New York. Even if I lived there, I'd just look at a clock or a watch.
Gets worse though, I was in California a while ago, and they had a newspaper called the "Sacramento Bee." That's just stupid! I wanted the news, not a stinging insect!
Yeah, but we do get the same news multiple times, which makes up for that.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Completely off-topic, the logo for today (in Tengwar) is complete gibberish. Whoever prepared it didn't realise that the keyboard layout didn't correspond to QWERTY, and apparently that Tengwar doesn't even map onto the Latin alphabet. Here is the correct orthography for English, and here is an Elvish orthography. Today's logo actually consists of the letters "zh h ch g j wh m". A fitting tribute to Slashdot that garbage from the submitter was posted without any editorial oversight.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Replying to myself: Actually come to think of it, what really did them in was probably stuff like the Huffington Post. Newsweek correctly guessed in the late 1990s that concise, not very cerebral, cribbed-from-somewhere-else summaries of generic news would have a wider audience than "serious" news, and be cheap to produce, too. So they moved in that direction, and it worked for a while. But then blogs happened, and now, why would you pay for Newsweek when the Huffington Post is almost exactly that, but free and updated more often?
It's hard to say it was a bad decision without using hindsight, because I'm not sure I would've predicted it at the time myself, but they picked the niche that was almost the worst possible niche to be in for competing against online news.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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"
If you were reading Newsweek at the dentist's office, I think I should tell you that Nixon isn't president anymore.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”