My twitterfeed, which is mostly comprised of writers, bloggers, and political pundits, is going crazy about the news that Newsweek will cease to produce a print magazine and is instead going all digital. Here's a sample of the links:
Russ Douthat at the New York Times
The Newsweek memo to staff
David Carr, the New York Times
Newsweek is following the path of other news magazines. They are putting all the chips on online, opinion writing. Doubling down. This is where the traffic is. They're moving their offices from DC to NYC. They're hiring tons of IT experts to create new websites and 20-something editors to mass produce content — cheaply compensated content that isn't sufficiently fact checked.
I'm benefiting from these changes, so I would be a real ass to complain about this transition, but the speed at which information is being produced scares me a bit. A lot. The writers have no safety net. This is the atmosphere that creates a Jonah Lehrer.
Apt. 11d 
That 2010 Douthat post was a very good look at the road Newsweek could’ve taken. But apparently it was too unappealing for them to contemplate.
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And I don’t think it’s fair to blame the move to online for Jonah Lehrers. There was plenty of fraud in the old days of flusher budgets.
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I really looked forward to Newsweek appearing in my mailbox for about a decade. I was a stay-at-home-mom. There was no internet. The mail usually came at 1:00, just in time for naps. I’d plop down on the couch in the sunny spot and spend a couple of hours reading Newsweek and the New Yorker and thumbing through the Pottery Barn catalog. I loved it.
I still subscribe to the New Yorker, but now catch up on back issues on long road trips. However, I haven’t subscribed to Newsweek for years. I get news other places.
I’m sad to see Newsweek go, but I guess I’m part of the problem.
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We subscribe to two national newspapers. We used to receive paper copies, but now read all content in digital form.
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We actually still subscribe to Newsweek! I guess not any more!
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You, my parents, and doctor’s offices were the last ones.
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I’ll always have a warm feeling towards Newsweek because of the fact that, when I was in the Peace Corps, all PCVs got free subscriptions to the international version of Newsweek. (In general, the international version was somewhat better than the domestic- less coverage of stars and pop-culture garbage and a bit less of adds disguised as news stories, though there still was some of that.) Never before or since the time I lived in Russia have I known more about Indonesia, all due to Newsweek International. I hope the new version of it will be a success, though I guess I’m not extremely optimistic.
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Hah. I developed a bitter dislike of Newsweek in the Peace Corps. It felt as if all the stories were about reactions to or implications of this week’s news, and it was really hard to figure out what had actually happened that they were talking about.
I fondly recall sitting around a Samoan bar with a bunch of other PCVs in summer 93, trying to figure out from the clues in Newsweek what a ‘low-speed chase’ could possibly mean.
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Fossils that we are, we still get three papers on the driveway every morning (NYT, WaPo, WSJ). To scratch the magazine itch, we get Economist and New Yorker and Atlantic. And then, well, Newsweek and Time never occur to us. Even online, we never go there. So, it can slip beneath the waves, and I’ll never throw a wreath.
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LizardBreath- I won’t say, exactly, that I _liked_Newsweek, but that I was grateful for it. Where I was, it was hard to get print in English, so was happy for it. (I also had a subscription to the international Christian Science Monitor- my understanding is that someone actually paid for that, as a donation of some sort. That I was very grateful for.) I guess my feelings for it are a bit like an old college roommate whom you may not have really liked, but are still story to see go.
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Funny how so many of the commenters here have peace corps experience. Totally cool.
When I first heard this news, I assumed that it was a positive thing for Newsweek. I believe the Atlantic has been extremely profitable, because of its expansion into the online news market. Way more people read the online version of the Atlantic than the print version. They are putting money into expanding their online offerings as a result. I thought that Newsweek was stealing their business model. But now I am not sure. It may be the last ditch efforts to keep the whole magazine afloat. That’s a sadder development.
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Internet Killed the Magazine Star
I read you on the subway back in Fifty Two
Riding downtown intent at reading only you.
If I was young it didn’t stop you coming through.
Oh-a oh
They took the credit for your second trilogy.
Rewritten by machine and interns working just for free,
and now I understand the problems you can see.
Oh-a oh
I met your children
Oh-a oh
What did you tell them?
Internet killed the magazine star.
Internet killed the magazine star.
Pixels came and broke your heart.
Oh-a-a-a oh
And now we meet in an abandoned studio.
We see the reprints and it seems so long ago.
And you remember the pages used to go.
Oh-a oh
You were the first one.
Oh-a oh
You were the last one.
Internet killed the magazine star.
Internet killed the magazine star.
On my phone and in my car, we can’t reload we’ve gone to far
Oh-a-aho oh,
Oh-a-aho oh
Internet killed the magazine star.
Internet killed the magazine star.
On my phone and in my car, we can’t reload we’ve gone to far.
Pixels came and broke your heart, put the blame on browser wars.
You are a magazine star.
You are a magazine star.
Internet killed the magazine star.
Internet killed the magazine star.
Internet killed the magazine star.
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Pretty good. I actually wasn’t able to see that video until years after it came out. We didn’t get MTV for a while.
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I loved Newsweek in the Peace Corps, too, carefully covered my copies with protective tape, and kept a (frequently pilfered) library of them in my EFL classroom. And fortunately, the OJ Simpson thing had started while I was still in the US (in LA, in fact), so I wasn’t coming to the story cold.
Of course, I had very limited access to print English stuff, so my standards for enjoyable reading matter were pretty low at the time. In fact, at some point I read Forever Amber and a bunch of Agatha Christie mysteries in Russian, just to have something to read.
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I loved Newsweek in the Peace Corps, too, carefully covered my copies with protective tape, and kept a (frequently pilfered) library of them in my EFL classroom. And fortunately, the OJ Simpson thing had started while I was still in the US (in LA, in fact), so I wasn’t coming to the story cold.
Of course, I had very limited access to print English stuff, so my standards for enjoyable reading matter were pretty low at the time. In fact, at some point I read Forever Amber and a bunch of Agatha Christie mysteries in Russian, just to have something to read.
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Thanks MH. “Pretty good” is about the top of my game today.
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I’m trying to avoid inflating the compliment supply and causing flattery inflation.
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I could have been effusive only if I had been willing to sanitize the intervention by letting the bus driver know exactly what I think of his hat.
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Bravo, Doug! *claps*
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Conservation of complimentarity is preserved!
Thank you Wendy!
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I was not in the PC, but I taught English in China and I used to read Newsweek Intl in the library’s foreign materials reading room. It was a nice break from struggling through Chinese articles, although I found a Chinese equivalent that I liked. I remember in particular an article on Chinese censorship in Newsweek, which included a line something like, “no Chinese person will ever be able to read this…” which I found highly ironic.
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