NEWSWEEK To Cease Print Publication

This handwriting's been on the wall since Sidney Harman (of Harman-Kardon fame) bought the magazine for one dollar* from the Washington Post Co. in 2010. That was just before he died, pursuant to which came the unholy matrimony of NEWSWEEK and The Daily Beast, under the helm of Tina Brown, wrecker of worlds. (I suppose the less said here the better; I sincerely dislike Tina Brown as an editor—don't know her as a person—and am quite astonished that she keeps finding not only employment but praise despite appearing to wreak carnage wherever she goes. I'm still grateful The New Yorker somehow survived her. Shut up now, Mike.)

Tina Brown's covers are sometimes controversial and often ridiculed...

...But on the good side, topical and political covers like this one probably wouldn't have been possible at The New Yorker if it weren't for the dark travesties of the Brown years.

The magazine has a local-to-me Wisconsin tie, too. It has long been printed by QuadGraphics, a huge printer of magazines and a large local employer (and a large user of Wisconsin paper, another leading local product). It was owned by philanthropist Harry Quadracci, who died a mysterious drowning death in 2002, not long after an unexplained warehouse fire. I believe QuadGraphics is the largest printer of magazines in the world; they print BusinessWeek, Time, Sports Illustrated, and People among many others. The real name of the distinctive new wing of the Milwaukee Art Museum, often called "the Calatrava addition" after its architect, is The Quadracci Pavilion. Landing the  NEWSWEEK account put QuadGraphics on the map in the early '70s.

NEWSWEEK will continue in electronic format, precisely in what form it's not entirely certain. Unknown is how much original photography the transmogrified publication will support, and whether any vestige of NEWSWEEK's once edgy, risk-taking photographic style will remain.

Mike

*Any magazine carries what's called "subscription debt"—what it owes to subscribers who've paid for magazines into the future that haven't been delivered yet. A purchaser of a magazine assumes the subscription debt, among possible other debts, and a payroll, and so forth, all of which in the case of NEWSWEEK must have been substantial. So the one-dollar sale price is a little misleading—Harman took on substantial debt in acquiring the flailing magazine.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Chuck Albertson: "Give Tina her due—in addition to more topical covers, she introduced photography to the pages of The New Yorker."

Dwight: "How long until the end of Time?"

Mark Roberts: "Someone gave me a gift subscription to Newsweek as a birthday present this year. I hadn't read the magazine in years and when I got my first issue I was appalled: thin (in every sense of the word) and insubstantial. Their demise is well-deserved and, after their sensationalistic (and scientifically absurd) 'Heaven is Real' feature story last week, can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned."

John Haines: "[Photography was] exactly what The New Yorker didn't need. I'm a photographer but I also like to read. After a few Tina issues I decided not to renew. I don't need to be dazzled with photographs; the reason I subscribed to The New Yorker in the first place (and for many years) is that it was a source of remarkably good writing—e.g., John McPhee."

Mike replies: It's still got a good portion of that. You should sample a few David Remnick issues. Too long on Middle Eastern politics for my taste, but a serious reader's magazine once more.

Comments

[John Camp]

I don't understand your attitude toward Tina Brown. As much as I've always disliked the New Yorker, I think she saved it from its own self-regard; it would have burned to the ground by now, just like Newsweek, if it had continued in that direction. And she was most famous, in some communities anyway, as the first New Yorker editor to take photography seriously as an art form. I think if you look at her Wiki entry -- not on her celebrity chasing, but the people she hired to work there, and the people who supported her -- instead of ruminating about her personality, you would change your mind. My favorite quote from the Wiki article:

Anxieties that Brown might change the identity of The New Yorker as a cultural institution prompted a number of resignations. Of them George Trow, who had been with the magazine for almost three decades, accused Brown of "kissing the ass of celebrity" in his resignation letter. (To which Brown reportedly replied "I am distraught at your defection but since you never actually write anything I should say I am notionally distraught.")

[Matt Law]

It looks like there were not enough readers interested in a magazine pulling stunts like these two, for example:

http://voices.yahoo.com/newsweek-palin-cover-big-controversy-newsweek-clarifies-4915434.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/10/industry-us-newsweek-idUSTRE77905S20110810

[Walter Glover]

"Tina Brown, wrecker of worlds" — Now she'll think you're awful.

I am with you in your appraisal of the woman.

[Carl Blesch]

I decided I'd let my Newsweek subscription of some 30 years lapse this fall because of the way the magazine has gone downhill recently. It's no longer worth my time and money, print or digital. How ironic that the week after it lapsed, they announce they're not going to have a printed edition anymore.
Carl

[Kevin Purcell]

The tense in the blog title is incorrect: NEWSWEEK will cease print production on Dec 31st 2012.

[Frank P]

Good Riddance. I was quite happy to cancel our Gannett "Newspaper" as well... I want to support free, competent journalism, not trash.

[MJFerron]

Rags in general like newspapers are in trouble. It's all instant and electronic now.

On a side note I find the top shot somewhat sexy but is the Newsweek cover the place for this photo? Maybe a last ditch effort to keep the ship from sinking.

[Rob]

I have come to regard "The New Yorker" as the best general interest magazine in the U.S. To the extent that Tina Brown moved it in its current direction, she deserves credit.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Pictures or none, weekly newsmagazines are relics of a bygone information era. Subscribing to a by-mail rendition of last week's news seems positively insane to young people. And, today, they're absolutely right: it's insane.

[Mike Johnston]

Ken,
I don't think it's "insane"--there's nothing inherently unfeasible about a week-in-review sort of publication. "The Week" is a digest about news from the week and synopses of commentary from around the western world, and they seem to be doing okay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/business/media/14magazine.html

It's just that people won't be GETTING their news from a weekly magazine. But then, hasn't that been true since the advent of television and the six o'clock news? Certainly since the advent of 24-hour news stations on cable TV.

It's tough to know whether Newsweek is one of a dying breed or just a dying one of a breed, if you get my drift. Maybe it just lost its way and made itself irrelevant. I personally think that the web hasn't made newspapers unneeded, for instance, it's just made it so that SO MANY newspapers aren't needed--we can really get by with half a dozen or a dozen that anybody can access instantly. We still need them. We just don't need them in every city every day.

Probably the same is true of magazines--we're in an adjustment period, for sure, but that doesn't mean that ALL magazines are inevitably going away. We just need fewer of them, and we probably need them to do different things. To me, for instance, The Week is useful; Newsweek wasn't. The New York Times is definitely useful (although I read it electronically); the Waukesha Freeman isn't.

Mike

[John Shriver]

In some ways, I think Tina Brown saved The New Yorker, gave them a sincerely needed kick in the pants. But it wasn't needed for too long. They had lost a lot of brashness they once had.

Been very happy with Seymour Hersh's work in The New Yorker.

But the only news weekly I find worth reading is The Economist. But it's a huge time investment to read even one issue. Time and Newsweek are fluff in comparison.

[Matt Mawson]

What has Newsweek done to merit all those upper case letters?

[Richard Tugwell]

John Shriver mentioned the Economist - Their sister publication "Intelligent Life" makes a good companion, and has some stuff worth reading, as well as good photography in the "Sunday Supplement" style. The iPad edition works nicely as well.

[Andrew Lamb]

"But the only news weekly I find worth reading is The Economist."

I'd like to recommend the New Statesman. A stimulating read.

I also agree with John Shriver's comment that Tina Brown gave the New Yorker a needed kick in the pants.

I love the New Yorker. About ten years ago, I visited Elizabeth Biondi in her office and I can still recall the thrlll when I saw those venerated covers on the corridor walls.

When Anderson And Young (think it was them) were hired to figure out where Conde Nast could make budgetary cuts-no Town Cars to collect your laundry etc, they were instructed not to touch the New Yorker. It's a very special publication.

[Crabby Umbo]

I was a long time subscriber to Newsweek back in the 80's and 90's, mostly because I saw it as a pretty well balanced periodical against the right wing slanted Time, but I have to agree with Carl Blesch, I picked one up off the news stand a while back, and it was literally a pamphlet, not worth what anyone is willing to pay for it.

We have a similar problem here going on with the local paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They've been through about 4 layoffs in the past three years, and each layoff and cut-back puts less local editorial content, and less local, well-researched and vetted editorial content, in the paper. They keep CLAIMING that they aren't letting people go from the content departments, but that doesn't mean that scads of very smart people with institutional knowledge of the city, haven't left, taking early retirements, and haven't been replaced.

The Milwaukee J/S has a long history of not knowing how to manage print, in an era where sharp management practices are going to be what saves printed media. They've run into ruin three magazine titles within the last six years, when they had opportunities to grow those vehicles through interesting story assignment and promotion. They killed them mostly through hiring marginal editorial people, then tying their hands about doing anything by cutting all expenses for story production, hoping just to use the vehicles for ad package placement for their current advertisers.

The latest death on their hands is the well-regarded Wisconsin Trails, a long beloved "up-north" magazine, that they bought a while back and then ran into the ground with poor editorial policies and refusal to pay to hire decent personnel. There was an opportunity to turn it into the mid-west version of Garden and Gun, but they didn't have the values and intelligence to do it, so they let it die a five year death of a "thousand cuts".

For all those people that say print is dead, I maintain that print can be done correctly, and at a profit, with the correct level of intelligence at the helm. And I've always said, those people who always tell me they "read" on line, well, if you really find out what they're doing, they aren't "reading", they're scanning, and they aren't getting near enough info out of on-line stories that they would have in the old days. Maybe those people just wouldn't be reading, period, today, if the internet didn't exist.

[John Ironside]

The Economist is the only news magazine I pay for, but more for the in-depth coverage and analysis of topics that interest me than for news. Arts reviews and science updates are excellent and obituaries usually an interesting surprise.

Politically it is relatively left-wing on social issues (by US standards, AFIK) and economically right-wing (by European). They claim to be "liberal" in the original sense of the word (not much of an insult, here in the UK).

[Peter]

Another vote for the Economist. They also figured out how to make an iPad version that is downloadable in a few seconds.

[Ben Rosengart]

I will not miss it, though I hope that our friend Peter Turnley won't be adversely affected by this turn of events.

[Mike Johnston]

Ben,
Peter's been retired from Newsweek for some while now.

Mike