Can Newsweek magazine survive?
The answer is that no one, including the people who work there, knows for sure.
With yesterday's bombshell announcement that The Washington Post Co. is putting the magazine up for sale, Time remains the last newsmagazine standing. U.S. News & World Report has long since gotten out of the print weekly business.
Now a perfectly fine buyer may emerge, but it seems a foregone conclusion that Newsweek at best will be a shriveled version of its former self. In fact, some people think that's already the case.
...Almost exactly one year ago, Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham was telling me that deliberately cutting its circulation in half -- from what had been a high of 3.1 million to 1.5 million -- would not destroy the money-losing magazine. He and his staff had decided to go upscale. The question, he said, involved advertisers: "Will they accept a more affluent Newsweek demographic, given that they've been acculturated all these years to think of us as a mass vehicle?" The answer is now apparent.
Part of the strategy was a radical redesign. I was not a fan of it, and neither, I can tell you, were a number of people who work there. By lumping a bunch of columnists together, playing up opinion and analysis in what Meacham called the "reported narrative" and the "argued essay," he transformed the magazine into an odd hybrid. In practice, it did seem to turn Newsweek into a version of the New Republic or the Economist.
...Editorially, though, I've always liked Newsweek (it is based in New York and editorially separate from The Post, and we see ourselves as competitors). I've enjoyed reading Meacham, Jonathan Alter, Howard Fineman, Evan Thomas, Mike Isikoff, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Samuelson and others. But the Web site was stuck around 1999, and in a digital world, that's an unforgivable sin.
Amazing to see another historic title go down. In my opinion, Meacham missed an opportunity. He tried to go upstream with run-of-the-mill polemics; of which the Internet is not in short supply. The reason the Economist works is not just because they have an editorial voice, but because their analysis is so sharp and cogent that it captures the real essence of the day's critical issues. The opinion comes from the analysis, not the other way around. The new Newsweek seemed to flip that -- the opinion was primary and the analysis was shaped to fit that mold. It didn't work.
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