Newsweek editor Tina Brown announced Thursday she would embrace a fully digital future as she revealed that the magazine's final print edition would be published at the end of the year.
Her announcement was a bow to gravity, as her unique blend of buzz and brio proved incapable of counteracting Newsweek's plummeting circulation and advertising amid an accelerating news cycle. Brown said there would be an unspecified number of layoffs as well.
Instead, a new digital publication called "Newsweek Global" would emerge that would be "really focused on a highly mobile, opinion leading and worldwide audience," said Baba Shetty, the new CEO of Newsweek and its sister website, the Daily Beast.
He said those elite readers in Belfast, Northern Ireland; Mumbai, India; or San Francisco have more in common than a broad subscriber base in the U.S.
But the digital-only play will require significant layoffs from the magazine that's already leaner than it once was. It's also not yet clear how Newsweek Global will retool to draw in paying digital subscribers to support it.
Once A Pillar Of The Press
In the 1980s and 1990s, Brown reinvigorated Vanity Fair and then the New Yorker to a significant degree of acclaim. More recently, the late billionaire inventor Sidney Harman brought her in to do the same after he bought Newsweek for a dollar from the Washington Post Co. After Harman's death, it was taken over by his partner, IAC's Barry Diller, who founded the Daily Beast with Brown. Unlike Harman, Diller has signaled he will not tolerate endless losses.
"We're in a very difficult reality for printed products — no doubt. The expenses for manufacturing are just remarkable," said Josh Tyrangiel, editor of Bloomberg Businessweek. "Any process that begins with — 'Go up a mountain and find a tree' — is not a particularly efficient process."
Efficiency didn't matter until recent years. Newsweek lagged behind Time magazine, but both flourished as pillars of the establishment press.
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