Newsweek to close its print edition
Newsweek is to axe its print edition after 80 years and move to digital-only from the new year.
Tina Brown, the editor-in-chief of Newsweek and sister digital news site the Daily Beast, told staff in an email that the last print edition will appear on 31 December.
The new digital-only publication, which will be called Newsweek Global, will be a "single worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context".
Newsweek Global will be supported by paid subscriptions, with content available for e-readers, tablets and the web, with some content also available on the Daily Beast.
Brown, a former editor of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, said that the shift to digital will lead to staff cuts and a downsizing of the business internationally.
"The inexorable move to an all-digital Newsweek comes with an unfortunate reality," she said in an email to staff on Thursday. "Regrettably we anticipate staff reductions and the streamling of our editorial and business operations both here in the US and internationally."
Brown was quick to point out that the cuts and move to digital was not about saying "goodbye" to Newsweek, but responding to the reality of the costs of maintaining a print publication.
"We are transitioning Newsweek, not saying goodbye to it," she said. "We remain committed to Newsweek and to the journalism that it represents. This decision is not about the quality of the brand or the journalism, that is as powerful as ever. It is about the challenging economics of print publishing and distribution."
Newsweek, which was saved for closure by the late Sidney Harman when he bought it for $1 from the Washington Post in August 2010, was swiftly merged with Brown's Daily Beast in a 50/50 joint venture later that same year.
Brown launched the Daily Beast – which is named from her favourite novel, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop – in 2008 with the backing of Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp.
"Newsweek is produced by a gifted and tireless team of professionals who have been offering brilliant work consistently throughout a tough period of ownership transition and media disruption," she said.
Earlier this year, Brown batted down reports that the print edition was doomed in an email titled "scaremongering". But in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, she confirmed the move had been in the works for some time. She said: "We have been exploring it since June in a very aggressive way, because all the industry trends have told us that it was only a question of when, not if…. It became increasingly important to us to embrace our future rather than just keep talking about it."
Some commentators have been critical of Brown's stewardship of the magazine. "Brown's Newsweek has been a bit of a disaster, really, and it started to truly fall apart last fall, amid reports of internal tumult at the magazine," wrote Tom McGeveran at Capital New York.
But the Gawker founder Nick Denton placed the blame on Diller. You have to go back to Talk to find Tina Brown's last failure. Since then, Diller has acquired a slew of companies and mismanaged them into irrelevance. Match.com, Ask Jeeves, the list goes on. Now watch him manage the decline of About.com," he wrote.
Felix Salmon, the financial blogger for Reuters, doubted the new digital Newsweek would work. "The chances that Newsweek will succeed as a digital-only subscription-based publication are exactly zero ... There's no demand for a digital Newsweek, and there's no reason, either, to carve off some chunk of the NewsBeast newsroom, call it Newsweek, and put its journalism onto a platform where almost nobody is going to read it."
Implication in Indian Print Journalism
The foretold closing down of the iconic Newsweek
weekly news magazine after 80 years, the last two years under the ownership of
digital upstart The Daily Beast, holds warning
signals and lessons for the future of many Indian magazines and newspapers
struggling to survive or just pretending to have a jolly good life with all the
scams and original and duplicate Kejriwalas swirling round.
The winding up of Newsweek print, (by 31 December) which even ten
years back was seen as a great asset and impregnable fortress of journalism,
shows how suddenly things can change. So will Time magazine
and Economist be next?
Time magazine is also not in a good shape. The reason,
as a senior editor of Time magazine told this reporter three
months back, is that since the genre (news and current affairs as weekly print
editions) is being over-run by digital, which advertiser would love to put
money into that genre in print? That is where the danger lies. No advertiser in
the US for instance will be looking to put his product on a news weekly print
genre. It is not a magazine which died with Newsweek. It is that unique thing
called the capsuling of news founded and perfected by Time magazine founder Henry Luce and the Reader’s
Digest founder,
Dewitt Wallace which is finished.
So it makes Times survival also in doubt. Time magazine’s role in the last few years
has been to try to make the average American readers aware of two things: China
and Islam. Covers on Islam and China are the norms now and the US as a land of
opportunities set, the staple diet of many magazines is no longer a subject. So
in terms of content both Time and Newsweek have been struggling to find a niche. Newsweek’s
coverage of Afghanistan has been creditable with some sources in the Taliban
too giving them stories of operations. But then there is a limit of how much
excitement the bombing of Helmand province can cause in Seattle or how many on
New York’s fashion streets will sit down to see pictures of Gadaffi’s last
moments on a printed page.
With this Tina Brown, the darling
of print journalism in the West has closed down two big print ventures, Talk which she founded and now Newsweek.
The new anti-editors are the big thing. Success in the print world now is
calculated on how many mags you close down. When you join as editor, you are
told to keep the circulation down. The rest is digital.
In Britain, tradition is holding
out against technology. How long no one can say. The Guardian too as recent figures show is in
trouble.
Certain drastic and unimagined things have happened over the
last five years, taking print journalism to the brink.
The high value, on-the–move reader,
the target audience of many news magazines, is now getting used to global
content. Thanks, of course to technology and the increasing number of
on-the-move imbibers of news, the print format makes little sense. He prefers
the digital. Tina Brown who did what was expected of her by turning Newsweek into full digital format, said that
she was surprised to see how many people worldwide read The
Daily Beast, which she also edits, in India and other corners of
the world. The Daily Beast, like Huffington
Post has been growing by leaps and bounds and there are 70 million
unique visitors to the DB site, up from 13 million just two years ago. That is
the reader which now Tina Brown in targeting. The American reader of print will
have to fend for himself. Welcome the global audience. Globalise the local
story.
For Time as for Newsweek,
it does not make sense anymore to run a print operation. Both have segued into
the digital world and their ipad apps are as good and value added, 38 percent
of people in the US access content digitally. Newsweek according to Tina Brown spent 43
million dollars a year in print production and distribution. That will be a
huge cost cutting for Brown. Time will also now follow suit in a year or too,
since it doesn’t make sense for them to be in print any more after the exit of Newsweek into a future which is a bit dicey but
can be handled.
In India, it takes about 10
minutes to download the Time magazine to the ipad. It is free for
those who are print subscribers like this writer. So even though I will get the
print edition on Tuesday I can download the global or Asian edition on Sunday
or Monday for free (not counting internet charges which are minimal.) which is
what I did in the case of the Mammohan Singh issue and the Aamir Khan cover. You
can also then figure out what the US edition has on the cover and take that
instead.
Apps have embedded videos, audio interviews, back issues and
special issues all of which a print edition cannot match. Also, the app now
replicates the turning of a page, all pages appear at thumbnails on the bottom
which you can scroll, the swish sound can be heard as you turn pages fast, and
there are audio of live events. A print mag which a TV station can embed clips
into, with every story.
No print magazine in India has grown substantially to make print
a viable option anymore. Most of the biggies have pulled out of ABC so that
circulation drop is not detected and so they survive on lies and half-truths to
get advertising. The back cover and double spread ads no longer excite the
producer of high end products for whom television offers huge and cheaper
opportunities. The Newspaper jacket is the only big advertising gimmick which
the printed world now has to offer. The rest is all passé. Just a replaying of
habit.
Distribution cost in India is about 40 percent and is a logistic
nightmare for many magazine salespeople. All this is solved by going digital.
The readership you lose in India is gained elsewhere. Though various magazines
have digital versions, they are not pushed for fear of print version
collapsing. Also, various cheap editions for one rupee and five rupees can be
put on various platforms and even low-end phones. Magzter, the one-stop
magazine vendor on the ipad has various Indian magazines already up for sale.
In the near future, India
Today, Outlook and Week, will have no option but to
scale down print circulation. The problem here in India is that there is
substantially less advertising available now for digital versions with a lot of
educating still left to do. The revenue of the internet version of a newspaper
gets in one year, might in some cases equal the advertising that the print
edition gets in two or three days. That though, maybe changing fast with more
online version running focused ad teams.
In India though newspaper owners, like the owners of any
industry on the decline have a habit of covering their head in the sand,
blissfully unaware or defiantly pretending ostrich-like, till it is too late.
How many of the 25 daily English newspapers available in Delhi make even
marginal profit and how many will survive?
With an intended pun on the famous American weekly, the message
is clear: Time to change.
Binoo K John was VP for digital
acquisition for e-reader company.
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