for the publishing industry at least.

Good luck to all the real workers and doers involved.

What's the answer though here? This is definitely the direction things are going. What does it mean for the economy?

Print can still turn a profit in many cases, but the margins are unacceptably low for many owners. So they jettison the whole deal, getting rid of many talented journalists and artists in the process, or slashing their pay and benefits.

There are deeper issues. Publishing is one of those businesses that often starts out as a labor of love at the ownership level, with direct engagement by the owner(s) in content or sales (i.e. selling the value of the content). When they care more about the product and the prestige associated with it than financial metrics there are few more enjoyable places to work. When this generation of ownership tires or moves on, they sell out and trouble begins. This happened all over publishing in the 80s and 90s, but print was still the only option back then. Now the twin pressures of digital and financial ownership are wiping the rest of it out, except in those increasingly rare cases where emotionally-invested owners still want to find a way to make it work.

Although I ended my sub long ago, it's sad to see this happen.

It's plainly clear that after ten plus years, the Internet has yet to come up with a really workable advertising revenue model - certainly not one capable of supporting the level of expenditures that went into traditional print, radio, and television media.

And I mean, a crapburger. I wouldn't read it in print OR online without a huge transformation in POV.

I was ending my subscription anyway and those I get for two of my kids at the end of this month. I haven't liked it at all since the takeover. Still getting subscription renewals in the mail, have to check if they specify it is going out of print market, and what the price is. Just curious not going to renew anyway. I have just been pitching them.

nothing was mentioned in the letters asking her to renew....

Yuck!

,

This is the best CYA solution she (or anyone) could have come up with.

Julie

I forget the exact numbers I heard, but print subscriptions are bad. Online subscriptions are thriving (or so they say).

The bad news in this is that some people are going to be out of work when Newsweek makes the transition.

She tried to marry the Newsweek format with the Daily Beast. Fail.

if they hadn't catapulted so much reich-wing propaganda.

A great magazine destroyed by the corporate masters.

might have helped them survive if the magazine, starting waaaay before Tina Browne, hadn't whittled down, dumbed down, and basically shed content to the point that it was a pamphlet arriving in the mail each week. Graphics, boxes, lists, pictures, three paragraph articles, crap, crap, crap. It became something I just wasn't willing to pay money for anymore. Not that it's any different than 99.9% of other magazines.

Ya know, I get that print is supposed to be a thing of the past, but maybe if the print products weren't becoming so downright worthless, they might have more of a chance. There was a time when I got about six subscriptions. I now have one. Each and every one cancelled because the magazine turned to shi*t. And frankly, the same thing has happened to my daily newspaper, I keep it because I can't imagine not getting a newspaper, not because it's doing me much good.

Rant over, soapbox dismounted - back to my 600 page book on the CIA in Vietnam.

It's been the National Enquirer of news rags for years.

jettisoned my subscription in '98. Newsweek and the Clinton penis, adulation of starr, cover to cover, every week.

I'd subscribed for years, but it stopped being worth the money.

Technology and digital media aside, I date Newsweek's downfall to when she took over.

I had been a Newsweek subscriber since about 1987, and had been a reader of it longer than that, since my dad had had a subscription from the early '70s on. I remember reading columns by Bill Moyers, Shana Alexander; reading stories about Watergate and the Watergate hearings as they happened.

When Brown took over, it was as if People took over.

When my subscription ran out, I didn't renew. I wasn't the least bit surprised when I heard this this morning. My only thought was, what took it so long? The magazine has been among the walking dead for years now.

It was officially dead when The Washington Post Co pulled the plug on it - although "Newsweek" as we knew it ended a couple of years earlier - they could no longer afford (due to their readership being decimated by the Internet) to be a traditional newsweekly and tried and failed to reposition the magazine to compete in the same (and much less costly) category as "The Economist" and "The New Republic". What's called "Newsweek" now really isn't "Newsweek" - it's a much lesser magazine that has a famous brand name on its cover- nothing more.

Used to love Newsweek and was a long time subscriber, but stopped several years ago and on the renewal notice wrote why I would no longer subscribe to that rag in bright Sharpie marker

if they go all-digital, and their content is still shit, then what is gained?

Nothing beats the web in immediate Breaking news.
The time has come and ALL print publicatiosn dealing with News is done.

A weekly doesn't handle that and never really did. The role it was supposed to have was as a place for more in-depth analysis and background.

And since that was "stodgy", they've pretty much dispensed with journalism in favor of politicotainment. And it's obvious how well that's working out for them.

It's just pushing us further and further into a new sort of dark age.

Not that I don't use the Net for news. But, my trusted sources , I want and demand a contemplative moment with a paper copy where you have an exchange of views. I am not satisfied the internet takes on that function.. The internet is more like TV where the news screams out at you at too fast a place and the more in depth analysis gets overlooked for the quick headline..
Newsweek says, they will reach out to a 'broader base." that base won't include me..
A main news source in this household is the Nation.. They are on alert, if they go to an all internet forum, we won't subscribe. Yes, I will pay more for my print copy, but I will not subscribe to their electronic forum.

subscriber.

Do you think The Nation would ever go all online? I hope not! One of the programs they have that I love is one where you can purchase a subscription for a library.

The Democratic Club in our town usually purchased a subscription of the Nation for our library...
We don't even have an ipad.. We just don't care.. We have a cell phone, we don't even use..
About reading our Nation on a bright PC screen.. No thanks.. Not for use..
Coffee and real print are much more compatible ..
I don't even relish buying products such as an Ipad and line the pockets of Apple or whomever and support cheap labor..
that just is not in keeping with our views about fair trade and sweatshop labor.
One way not to enrich the likes of Apple. Don't buy their crap..

The Internet has yet to fill the gap left when the print media got out of the serious journalism business. There is currently nowhere to go it get good, reasonably unbiased analysis of the political situation.

thanks for the insights, though...

I cancelled my 10 year plus subscription not long after I read this article:

When Newsweek announced Tuesday that it was hiring Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos to be a contributor during the 2008 presidential campaign, Kos told his readers, "Newsweek is ‘balancing' me out with someone that should make heads on our side explode."

As reported by the Washington Post moments ago, Moulitsas was quite prescient:

Newsweek has signed the president's former deputy chief of staff [Karl Rove] as a commentator who will turn out several columns on the 2008 campaign through inauguration day.

The Post continued (emphasis added throughout, h/t NBer Right2thePoint):

The move is not likely to prove popular among liberals who believe the mainstream media have been too soft on the Bush administration.

"We want to give readers a feel for what it's like to be on the inside," says Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham. "Our readers are sophisticated enough to know that what they get from Karl has to be judged in the context of who Karl is...Readers will have to decide if he's simply an apologist."

Newsweek (which is owned by The Washington Post Co.) will announce tomorrow that it is granting regular space to both Rove and Markos Moulitsas, the liberal firebrand who founded the Web site Daily Kos. "I'm fully prepared for both the right-wing and left-wing blogosphere to be outraged, which means we're doing our job," Meacham says.



Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/11/15/karl-rove-joins-newsweek#ixzz29ePbdyLU

The main reason was the advent od the internet. Newsweek has always had conservative voices including weekly columns by Milton Friedman and George Will

It died about the same time as Time.

Bingo!

Both with top cover stories like "Superman is 50!!!!" And "A medical doctor goes to heaven!"

OK, that's interesting.... but the cover story for a news mag?????

About 1967.

some things. So far it hasn't actually increased the quality of what's out there.

every magazine that goes digital is like death of a thousand cuts to how I earn a living.

which is basically the same thing as Newsweek is now -- only it's free and updated more often.