Posted on 12/29/2009 7:19:47 AM PST by abb
Less than a year ago, during yet another public discussion about the future of traditional media, I said that it seemed extremely unlikely that, for instance, Newsweek would last another five years, provoking guffaws among blogger types and stout denials from the magazine (i.e. a minor kerfuffle).
Newsweek and its parent, the Washington Post Co., announced yesterday a significant cut in its rate base, a further round of buyouts and layoffs, and a plan to make an already anorexic magazine even thinner. The Washington Post Co., for good measure, added its own bad news and bleak outlook.
My prediction about Newsweek seems to have been significantly optimistic (when I made it, I confess to thinking it was irresponsibly exaggerated). I would revise it now to two years: Sometime around the fourth quarter of next year, Newsweek will be shuttered (possibly there’s a phase where it goes bi-weekly, or even monthly).
The people at Newsweek and at the Washington Post Co. will be as adamant and dismissive about denying this as they were about my original assertion. And yet, they obviously can’t be certain they have a positive future (or any future).
All they can honestly say is that they are trying to find a way to go forward that will keep them in business, but they haven’t found it yet. Now, I am not sure that would be a good idea to say—it might further cause advertisers and readers to desert the magazine, and further demoralize the staff.
On the other hand, it might be this gap between putting on a good face and the stark reality of the present mess that is making people so much more desperate and crazy. Not that long ago, the covers of Newsweek and Time were among the most important individual pieces of media in the nation. Now they are irrelevant and unmentioned.
This decline and approaching death does not merely have to do with the present circumstance. The present circumstance (we have yet to coin a useful and evocative name for this terrible present circumstance) is really just the deus ex machina.
The weak and lingering will no longer be able to resist. But how do you confront this? How do you say to your colleagues and your customers, while we’re still here today, in all honesty we’re toast tomorrow?
Saying anything other than that is so obviously corporate baloney, as well as the natural human inability to face the abyss.
The Obama administration will find a way to keep them afloat. Newsweek, after all, is a valuable part of their propaganda machine.
It's not the format that is the problem.
Its the abject, rampant, rabid liberal bias, 0bamabot bias , anti-Republican hate, anti-conserrvative hate, anti-Plain hate that is the problem.
It's irrelevant what format they put Newsweek or Time on, conservatives still won't buy it.
Meanwhile, the more objective Wall Street Journal actually registered an INCREASE in circulation this year, making it the largest circulation newspaper in the country, even in the midst of a recession.
Being an 0bamabot rent boy is bad for your ratings/circulation/financial health, no matter what format it comes in. That is why Fox News ratings have shot up this year, even as MSNBC and CNN have registered huge ratings collapse.
LOL! There are a LOT of union employees lurking in or near that sentence.
Ummm.. did you read the article at all?
The New York Times continues to exist like a guy in a coma continues to exist.
Just getting fed, sleeping and breathing every day, while lying prone in bed is not what I'd call really living.
And how is that “bailout” working out for General Motors then? No amount of TARP is going to save a bad business.
And what do they propose to do when we take over the Huose next year?
they should just revive Look (since the whole mag is nothing but pictures of Obama anyway)
WSJ, IBD, National Review, and American Spectator
They can’t go under soon enough for me.
In that case the name "Newsweek" is no longer appropriate.
How about something like "Spewsweek"?
bump
Oprah will start sharing the cover of O Magazine with Obama.
But that might only last a few months, until her magazine folds too.It’ll be interesting, now that I think of it, to watch what happens to her magazine once her show no longer rules TVLand.
The Times lost $.30 per share over the last 12 months. The longer the Times continues to consume the wealth of the silk stocking leisure class before it dies, the better off America will be.
Exactly!
Can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to buy the Obama magazine. /s
Washington just CAN’T let one of their propaganda organs die! They will breathe life back into it — from the massive slush funds or a new “media bailout package,” or something.... They MUST have herr Goebbels tools...
“Pure sex appeal play to boost sales and stay alive”.
-——yeah, that’s probably the way they saw it , but it
turned out more like “killing two stones with one bird”,
as it backfired, and you can figure out who or what exactly who owned those “two stones”.
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