Is Newsweek A Brand “That Will Disappear In 2010″?
Jim Geraghty writes, “Holy smokes. Newsweek has lost almost $30 million this year?”
With Obama on the cover every other week, and with pictures of Palin’s legs in running shorts?
That’s why a business blogger puts Newsweek on its list of “10 Brands That Will Disappear in 2010.”
That business blogger is Douglas A. McIntyre of 24/7 Wall Street, who writes:
Newsweek. The magazine already has slashed its rate base (circulation guaranteed to advertisers) from 3.1 million to 2.5 million. It has announced further cuts that will take this figure to 1.5 million early next year. The New York Times reported that Newsweek’s advertising fell 29.9% through the first three quarters of 2009. According to the 10-Q for The Washington Post Company (NYSE:WPO), Newsweek ad revenue plunged 47% in the third quarter from the year before. The magazine has lost almost $30 million so far this year. Newsweek had hoped to transform itself into a poor man’s version of the Economist and has largely dropped covering breaking news and reviews of the big stories of the week. The change in the editorial direction of Newsweek may have been the right thing to do, but it came much too late. Newsweek, like many other print products, hopes to rely on internet readership and advertising to improve its fortunes. Audience measurement firm Compete indicates that the audience of Newsweek.com has dropped 15% in the last year to 1.3 million unique visitors a month in October. Audience research firm comScore shows an even sharper decline. That is, by itself, an important indication that the public has not been attracted to the “new” Newsweek. The Washington Post has enough trouble with fixing problems at its flagship paper. Its online news and commentary magazine, Slate.com, had more than 3.8 million visitors in October. Slate has none of the legacy print costs of Newsweek.
While the handwriting was on the wall as early as 2005 with its crazy “Koran in the Can” story and that same year, the Anti-American cover that graced its overseas edition, late last year, Newsweek attempted a disastrous makeover that attempted to shift the magazine from a relatively staid newsweekly (hence the name!) to a magazine that Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard brilliantly described as “a liberal opinion magazine written by liberals who don’t want to admit they’re liberals.”
Ferguson’s article was titled, presciently it now seems, “Some Industries Deserve Bankruptcy.” His former publisher helped to further define that classification in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:
Some newspapers and news organizations will not adapt to the digital realities of our day—and they will fail. We should not blame technology for these failures. The future of journalism belongs to the bold, and the companies that prosper will be those that find new and better ways to meet the needs of their viewers, listeners, and readers.
First, media companies need to give people the news they want. I can’t tell you how many papers I have visited where they have a wall of journalism prizes—and a rapidly declining circulation. This tells me the editors are producing news for themselves—instead of news that is relevant to their customers. A news organization’s most important asset is the trust it has with its readers, a bond that reflects the readers’ confidence that editors are looking out for their needs and interests.
And Newsweek seemed to violate that pledge with seemingly every other cover story this year.
Most readers expect some sort of center-left bias in the magazines at the supermarket checkout line, but most publications attempt to hide it beneath glossy, friendly covers and headlines. Newsweek’s tilt to the hard left was so obvious, even Howard Kurtz the famously see-no-bias media critic of the Washington Post, which owns Newsweek, wrote about it at the start of 2009 with a surprisingly gimlet eye:
When Rick Stengel joined Time in 1981, every story in progress filled a thick binder — the reporter’s version, the editor’s rewritten version, the top editors’ version, the fact-checked version — that would be unimaginable in today’s cut-to-the-bone corporate culture.
Many of the recently laid-off staffers, Stengel says, “were people whose jobs really didn’t exist any more.”
When Jon Meacham joined Newsweek in 1995, “there was a phrase in the culture — ‘We need to get something in on X’ — that we never use anymore,” he says. The days of a “newsmagazine of record,” Meacham says, are long gone.
The rival editors are turning out weeklies that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal. They are pursuing a more elite audience, in print and on the Web, abandoning the old Henry Luce notion of catering to the masses. It is nothing less than a survival strategy.
A month later, Jonah Goldberg wrote at National Review:
It’s hardly a secret that both Time and Newsweek have become much more polemical and openly liberal in order to cut costs and stay relevant. Newsgathering can be expensive. Weekly newsmagazines are disadvantaged in a 24 news environment. In and of itself, I have no problem with news organizations becoming more opinionated. Publications are not honor-bound to go out of business clinging to outdated business models. Still, the transformation does illuminate some things.
First, it demonstrates that mainstream reportorial and editorial staffs were always exactly as liberal as conservatives said they were. If mainstream journalists were as objective as they always claimed, you’d think that at least some of them would reveal themselves to be conservative once it became acceptable for them to express their biases openly. And, yet, time and again whenever “objective” reporters are permitted to let their hair down and express their opinions it turns out — surprise! — that they were liberals all along. For example, with possibly one exception (John Tierney’s short-lived column), every time The New York Times gives an opinion column to one of its reporters, they reveal themselves to be a perfectly conventional liberals or leftwingers (off the top of my head: Maureen Dowd, Anthony Lewis, Bill Keller, Thomas Friedman)
Read the cover story, “We’re All Socialists Now” by Evan Thomas and Jon Meacham in the latest Newsweek, and you’ll see what I mean. Amidst the analysis, there’s a certain — totally predictable — tone of celebration.
When Time magazine ran it’s gushing, wish-it-were-so, cover story about Obama’s “New New Deal,” they asked Peter Beinart to write it. I don’t mean this as a slight at Peter, but it’s hardly as if they tapped him to write an objective news story.
Which brings me to another point. While I have no problem with Time and Newsweek becoming better funded and “newsier” versions of The New Republic, I do think they have an obligation to be honest about it. These are now reported opinion magazines, more reported than TNR or NR, but not that much less opinionated. The difference is that The New Republic and National Review admit their biases and let the readers make their own judgments. Time and Newsweek want it both ways. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.
At the end of the year, it’s obvious that strategy isn’t exactly working out well. Newsweek bet heavily that its target audience was as homogeneous a group as the writers in its bullpen — or worse, that they could put one over on those readers by attempting to be the equivalent of the New Republic and the Nation within a more centrist-appearing brand name — and failed spectacularly.
While the brand may yet be too powerful to die in 2010, market forces will transform it yet again, and it will interesting to see what’s next, one way or another.
Update: Fark links, noting “Newsweek lost $30 million this year and may shut down in 2010. In other news, evidently Newsweek is still publishing.” Only until their programming finally allows them to find Sarah Connor…
Related: 30 years after Alvin Toffler wrote about the concept in The Third Wave, Newsweek finally notices telecommuting and the decentralized nature of the Internet, decides it doesn’t like them one bit.
Will Barack Obama have the political capital to send a few bucks to Newsweek and the other financially troubled left-wing publications who are willing to play ball? This will probably determine its ability to survive in 2010. Its parent company, the Washington Post, is also losing millions of dollars annually. How much more money can they afford to throw down a rat hole?
Their staff cuts and branch closings outstrip the national average by 500 percent. No wonder they’re socialists.
During the ’90′s I had subscriptions to both Time and Newsweek, and our daily newspaper – and could hardly wait for them to come in. Now I won’t spend money on any of them except the occasional Sunday paper (only for the ads). I vehemently hate being lied to, and twisting or misrepresenting facts to push a particular agenda is lying.
My parents still get their daily, but stopped their subscriptions of “news” magazines several years ago in disgust. When all you are getting is propaganda, why buy?
Newsweek has pretty much abandoned even the pretense of being an objective news source. Frankly, if it weren’t for Robert Samuelson, I wouldn’t read it at all.
The free market alone is not enough to destroy these dinosaurs. They’re just too valuable to the Democrats. They’ll prop them up with taxpayer dollars as long as they can.
The market certainly doesn’t need the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, and Time. They all write the same things from the same angle (and ignore the same things for the same reasons). Eventually, one of them will break from the pack and move to the center. But most will die a well-deserved death. The last one standing can write a great Pulitzer-winning obituary for all the rest of the Democrat Party newsletters.
We had a personal subscription to Newsweek and a gift subscription for a relative, and we let both drop this year after the format change. We got a desperate-sounding marketing call just last night asking us to renew.
The increasing liberal “voice” in the magazine is only one of its problems. The same reporters who could turn out a magazine full of short-form five-paragraph stories competently have proven to be really bad at the longer-form essays. Sub-par opinion writing on politics has been a Newsweek staple since long before they hired Jonathan Alter. Why do I want to waste my time on sub-par opinion writing about science, economics, medicine, etc.?
I’ve been getting Newsweek for the past seven or eight years because my father-in-law keeps giving us yearly subscriptions. I have tried to cancel the subscription a couple of times. There has always been some kind of stumbling block to canceling, though. Computers down, said they would do it but didn’t, no answer and voice mail full. Granted, I usually called on the most egregious weeks, when they were probably swamped with cancellations, but I thought it was interesting that they basically won’t allow you to cancel even if you don’t care if they keep the money. They need those sub rates for ad sales. Dishonest practice all the way around.
It goes right in recycling and does not taint my eyes.
This year I’ve asked my in-laws not to give us subscriptions because we’re “trying to environmentally responsible and don’t want to support the waste of paper”. We’ll see if it takes.
Daydream: What if the Breibarts of the world could get their hands on Newsweek, and at every grocery check-out THEIR headlines would be the cover-story of the week? Bet it would fly off the racks.
Are you listening, Mr. Graham?
The declining circulations at these “news” magazines seems to track very accurately the declining fraction of independent voters who support the far-left Obama administration.
Indeed, why should a curious citizen with a wide horizon if interests pay anything for news which is filtered through an agitprop bureau? OF COURSE he’s going to find a more reliable source.
And yet Fox News goes from ratings triumph to ratings triumph.
It’s not that Newsweek went opionated, it’s that the opinions are not terribly popular, and a dime a hundredweight.
Pardon my glee after NEWSWEEK shoved its politics at me for years, forcing me to cancel it.
From NEWSWEEK I learned that “the family is irrelevant,” “single moms are just as good as families,” “taxes can never be high enough,” “Reagan is a moron,” “Quagmire in Iraq,”..”The deadly Afghan winter,” “global cooliing is on the way,” “no make that global warming,” …..”no, now its climate change,” …..”no we’ve never heard of Climategate,”…
No wonder millions of people have abandoned NEWSWEEK. The people it needed. People that read. The large circulation magazines are sinking with the big newspapers. Partly due to internet advertising, but the bulk (I believe) is because millions of people who read a lot are fed up with being preached to and sneered at.
We are like black people made to feel unwelcome in a Alabama restaraunt in the 50′s. After they didn’t give us water and ignored us, we left and didn’t come back. Now they wonder where all their business has gone!
People who read more than bumper stickers, and want facts not slogans left NEWSWEEK as it abandoned us for people who DON’T read much at all.
Despite my glee, its decline is a loss of sorts. NEWSWEEK could be a national unifying force in a blizard of punditry, but it chose to hector its audience with all the “right” points of view.
Its a shame the editors have squandered its heritage. Just as GM and its unions wasted away a great national treasure, NEWSWEEK’s editors have done the same. We’re all pooer for it, since it would be good to have a national news magazine. Some source of facts everyone could rely on. Alas, not to be.
Even ignoring the political bias, Newsweek’s new strategy never made much sense to me. The Economist is able to thrive as the big-picture analyst of the news because the audience has a degree of confidence that their authors are bringing something to the table – a high degree of intelligence and background on the issues. The opinion magazines like The New Republic or The National Review are able to succeed because their audience feels they bring something different to the table – a thorough grounding in the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of the views they espouse. Newsweek, on the other hand, has never really made clear to me what they were even trying to convince me they brought to the table. There was not a compelling reason for even people who agreed with them to buy their magazine.
I´mno expert, but shouldn´t a circulation of 1,5 million be more than enough to survive? The Economist doesn´t have more and it is considered a success.
I read Newsweek growing up and still had a subscription as a gift from my parents but just cancelled it. Reading it was like visiting a Bizarro World. Yoko Ono is a genius, Joe Biden is a sage, Obama is the messiah, Hugo Chavez has a lot to offer, America is now socialist, etc. Each week the wife and I would joke what the cover story would be “Michele Obama – Too Pretty?”
The difference between the Koran being flushed down a toilet and Newsweek being flushed down the toilet is that the former was a journalistic lie while the latter is a commercial fact.
El Gordo–it’s a question of demographics, in part. The Economist can make more money from its smaller reader base because their readers are more educated and have more disposable income. Newsweek is probably more expensive to produce, as well, because of the way the magazine is set up. They have lots of fluffy stuff which The Economist ignores, and for every entertainment writer who sends us dispatches from Hollywood, that’s one less reporter who can write an in-depth article about the instability of the ERM or something similar.
I have always considered Newsweek to be the left leaning news weekly. That goes back 50 years. Times was the centrist and US News was mildly conservative, as I saw things back when I read them. I subscribed to the Economist for years but didn’t read the US section because it was left leaning and not all that astute. I subscribed to TNR for many years and gave my kids gift subscriptions. When Marty Peretz fired Michael Kelly because he criticized Al Gore, I quit and haven’t read it since.
What is new is the access we have to real reporting, like Michael Totten and Michael Yon. I can read newspaper web sites in Asia. I’m not stuck with the NY Times, which has badly declined as opinion invaded its news pages. The choices for real news appeared just as the old sources got the left wing religion.
Die, Newsweak, die! You’ve deserved a spike through the heart for decades. You’ve never seen a conservative you liked, and never seen a liberal (no matter how slimy) you didn’t. Well, you’re now circling the drain and this is one American who is glad to see you almost gone. I wouldn’t have considered your rag suitable to line a bird’s cage with, much less wrap a fish. You would have to pay me a sizable sum to ACCEPT a subscription from you, and I certainly wouldn’t read it.
Take your lies, half-truths, evasions and Obama-worship to the grave with you. When you’re gone, some will celebrate your demise but most won’t even notice or know you’re gone. You CERTAINLY won’t be missed. Bye!
Sadly, The Atlantic Monthly has made a similar choice. I read TAM cover to cover every month for 25 years, but had to give it up finally, sadly, a couple of years ago. TAM used to have abroad range of viewpoints and thoughtful, intellectual articles. After the untimely death of Michael Kelly, it began a steep descent. Not, TAM is just another journal of far leftist group think. They even allow a deranged COnspiracy theorist like Andrew Sulloivan to rant on there about Sarah Palin’s womb and the like. This month’s cover asks if Christianity caused the crash, a headline you would expect to see on Scrappleface, not a magazine with TAM’s history and pedigree.
The narcissism of so many of the publishing business’s editors and executives (a Baby Boomer thing?) seems to drive more and more of them into imagining that their narrow club’s opinions are facts, or at least all the opinions that should matter to their readers, whom they clearly see as easily manipulable.
The sooner these journals of Upper West Side tribalism go down, the better for us all, I guess.
Used to read US News and Time, and occasionally Newsweek. We’re talking from junior-high school until maybe five years out of college.
These days I’d rather stick my arm in a vat of paint remover than even touch a copy of Newsweek. I mean, something like Mother Jones or the Utne Reader can sometimes have something entertaining in it, but Newsweek since the Great Leap Leftward has been not only leftist but a really strident, lousy read.
Forbes magazine is relatively conservative. And it covers general news to a degree. If you want a weekly that you can look forward to, give it a try.
I have been subscribing to Newsweak for almost 40 years. The subscription runs out this month and will not be renewed. For the past two years they have been the unofficial organ of the Obama candidacy and now administration.
No need to worry. They’ll become an oficial organ of this administration instead of being an unofficial one.
I have been a loyal reader of Newsweek for over 40 years. Let me repeat that: 40 YEARS. And I am letting my subscription lapse. I don’t need dozens of opinion columns each week. I want in-depth, detailed, relatively objective news information. I want to read more than the latest news-byte I read on-line, I don’t need to know what people THINK about a topic or decision (I can make up my own mind, thankyouverymuch), and I certainly don’t want to read some obviously biased piece that I can pretty much write myself after reading the name of the columnist. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Newsweek, you sold your soul long ago to make a buck. I’m glad you’ll be dead soon.
I’m so eagerly looking forward to the collapse of ‘News’week. I may throw a party!
I glanced at a copy of our local Billings Gazette the other day. The front page clearly showed why I no longer subscribe. There was an article about millions of dollars of damage to sugar beet crops in Montana by an amazing cold snap we had in early October (0 degrees F.), a forecast for temperatures well below 0 now (I had -25 degrees F. this morning), and a glowing AP screed about how the Copenhagen climate meetings and Obama were going to fix “global warming”. Give me a break.
By the way, a lot of Robert Samuelson’s articles are available for free on Realpolitics.com, as well as a lot more.
For news this weak…Marxists turn to Newsweak.
Time / Communist News Network is going down the same path.
Sorry, that is Realclearpolitics.com.
When moving my parents to a nursing home I had their mail forwarded to my home. Along with the usual bills was a subscription to Newsweek. I found the periodical to be odious to the extreme and detested their left-wing political slant. As time went on I ignored countless cancellation notices when the subscription ran out. That was over four years ago and we still receive the magazine each edition like clockwork. Clearly their circulation is on the wane and my guess is that they continue to distribute to unpaid “subscribers” artificially inflating their circulation numbers to maintain advertising rates. My take is their real paid circulation is well below 1.3 million. Good riddance Newsweek and don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out.
The only time I come in contact with Time or Newsweek is in the Dental or Doctors office. I pick it up out of curiosity and each time I end up throwing it down in disgust.
When I was growing up I read these magazines all the time as my parents subscribed and they were always scattered about the house (my parents were hopelessly disorganized). Needless to say, I have not seen either magazine at my parents house for many years now.
As a kid I accepted that these publications as articles of truth. I never considered that people would publish untruths. Much like a young boy that steals a Playboy from his Dad accepts much of the content as a truthful representation of the real world. I was devastated when I discovered reality.
What I have learned as I’ve grown and experienced life is that almost none of the content of Newsweek and Playboy is based in reality…
Newsweek’s cover story in 1982 bore the banner line “Reagan’s America: And the Poor Get Poorer” just as though President Reagan wanted poor people to get poorer or didn’t care if they did. I haven’t bought another issue since. Now that they have dropped even the pretense of news reporting, I doubt that I will.
Cinabar, if Newsweek has been renewing your subscription free of charge for years this may not be deliberate on their part. Their subscription records might be as just as accurate as their reporting.
Newsweek is beginning a new chapter in its history. Chapter 7!
Next stop: Air Americaville. All aboarrrrrd!