Newsweek’s future Goodbye ink

Newsweek’s future

Goodbye ink

Oct 18th 2012, 21:24 by A.E.S.

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MOST 79-year-olds are haunted by fears of their own mortality. After some months of speculation, it was confirmed today that Newsweek, the American weekly, would not live to see its 80th birthday in its current form. The last print edition will be published on December 31st. In 2013 Newsweek will be rebranded Newsweek Global. It will run exclusively online and on tablet devices and will charge for content. A few articles will be available free on the Daily Beast, a website which merged with Newsweek in 2010 and does not have a paywall.

Newsweek must respond to two kinds of challenges: one shared with peers, the other unique to its ownership structure. Advertising revenue for print publications has softened along with the economy, and no one reading this blog needs reminding that more people are now looking to the internet for news. Newsweek’s total circulation dropped by more than 51% between 2007 and 2011, to around 1.5m.

But why stop printing so soon? This is where Newsweek’s owners come in. In 2010 the Washington Post sold Newsweek to Sidney Harman, a 92-year-old billionaire, for $1 and $47m in assumed liabilities. He died last year, and this summer his family announced that they would no longer invest in the magazine and the website. Barry Diller, a savvy media investor who runs IAC/InterActiveCorp and is the other owner of Newsweek, probably did not want to stomach the magazine’s losses alone. It will reportedly lose as much as $22m this year. The costs of running a digital publication are much lower. Some jobs will also be axed.
Tina Brown, the editor of the Daily Beast and Newsweek, and Baba Shetty, the boss of Newsweek Daily Beast Co., announced the closure today. They wrote online that they have “reached a tipping point at which we can most efficiently and effectively reach our readers in all-digital format.” The optimism partially stems from the popularity of tablet computers, which give news organisations hope that more readers will be willing to pay for news as long as it is portable. But it is unclear whether this model will work. Losses at the Daily, an iPad-only magazine launched by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in February 2011, have piled up.
Newsweek’s digital reincarnation at least has the advantage that the brand is already well known. Print subscribers may elect to read it online, if they are not already doing so. Or they could migrate to all those websites that give away their content without a subscription fee—like the Daily Beast.

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