Newsweek magazine to print its last copy on December 31st
By Shafey Danish (NVONews.Com)
For a long time Newsweek has been one of the best known American magazines around the world. Along with Time magazine it represented the very apogee of news magazines. Then, the media changed and Newsweek started struggling.
First, it stopped its digital website, when it merged with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast website in 2010. And now comes the news that it will print its last hardcopy print issue on Dec 31st. Bye, bye Newsweek.
Tina Brown who was the Editor in Chief of the Newsweek Daily Beast Co, after the merger said this was not a bye, bye, but rather a transition. “We are transitioning Newsweek, not saying goodbye to it,” Brown and Baba Shetty CEO said in a blog post. Brown blamed the high cost of running a print publication for shutting it down.
There will of course be job cuts, as the entire staff that is exclusive to print will be laid off, but the blog did not say how many. It did give some boilerplate statement about how Newsweek had been able to target a growing share of audience via tablets like the iPad, the Kindle, etc, and had now reached a ‘tipping point’ where the best way for it to go forward was go shut down the print operation. (You would notice that the blog does not mention any concrete numbers, and they can’t be good if they are having to shut down print for lack of money).
Now, Newsweek will be exclusive available in digital format. The blog said it will be subscription based and some content will be available on the Daily Beast website. This is little confusing. Newsweek had shut down its own website. Typing in Newsweek led to the Daily Beast website. It would be darn difficult to sell a subscription based all digital magazine without a website where readers could go through the content list, preview the content, and read some of it for free. But the post says some of the content will be available on Daily Beast, no mention of a separate site at all.
Will the Newsweek function as a separate section within the Daily Beast, but will not be merged with its own digital offerings? Or this is just a veiled way of saying goodbye to Newsweek?
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