Newsweek and New York Magazine Going in Different Directions!

Dear Commons Community,

The Internet has had significant impact on how we receive our news.  Print media has especially been impacted as more people use freely-available online services.  Yesterday there were announcements concerning two major magazines.

First, Newsweek will be bringing back its print edition after transitioning to an all-digital format late last year.

The New York Times reports that the weekly magazine will start printing again in January or February. Newsweek Editor in Chief Jim Impoco was quoted as saying that Newsweek will “be a more subscription-based model … We see it as a premium product, a boutique product.”

When Newsweek ended its print edition in 2012, the magazine had been printing since 1933. At the time, then-editor of Newsweek and The Daily Beast Tina Brown said, “In our judgment, we have reached a tipping point at which we can most efficiently and effectively reach our readers in all-digital format.”

Second, going in a different direction,  New York magazine announced that it will switch to a biweekly publishing schedule.

The transition will officially take place in March.  In one way, New York is a smashing magazine success. It is a perennial winner at the National Magazine Awards, and its editor Adam Moss is often described as one of the best in the business. New York also has a widely read, widely loved website.

However, as the New York Times’ David Carr, who broke the news on Sunday night, wrote, praise and talent can’t always win out over radical shifts in technology:

New York, with a current subscriber base just above 400,000, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, got clobbered after the 2008 recession when classified ads went missing and stayed that way. So far this year, the magazine is down 9.2 percent in ad pages compared with the same period last year.

Tony

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