I’ll tell you a secret: I’ve stopped subscribing to both Newsweek and Time — and I wasn’t even paying for it from my own pocket.
The reason? I simply no longer found any use for them. The last story I remember eagerly reading was Newsweek’s post-election special, which was fantastic. The other stuff, not so much. Newsweek still occasionally manages to catch my attention; Time, almost never. And in the unlikely event of there being something I truly need, I can always look it up online — for free.
Faced with its do-or-die moment, Newsweek is planning an overhaul, “a major change in its identity, with a new design, a much smaller and, it hopes, more affluent readership”, the New York Times reports. “The venerable newsweekly’s ingrained role of obligatory coverage of the week’s big events will be abandoned once and for all”, NYT quotes executives as saying.
Good news is, it can be done. Look at the reinvigorated Foreign Policy. They recruited the best minds in the business to blog and provide original reporting, and in one fell swoop managed to make the magazine indispensable.
The bad news? They did it online.
Wait… what’s the bad news?
Yeah, that may have been a little unclear…
What I meant was, I’m pessimistic about Newsweek’s chances of turning into a vibrant online publication. Or, put it another way, of turning the print publication into something like the new Foreign Policy. Any clearer?