May 06 2010
For generations, Time and Newsweek fought to define the national news agenda every Monday on the newsstand.
Before the Internet and before cable television news, what the newsweeklies put on their covers mattered.
As news becomes harder to sum up in a single cover, that era seems to be ending.
The Washington Post Co. announced Wednesday that it would sell Newsweek, raising questions about the future of that newsweekly, which was first published 77 years ago.
Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post Co., said in an interview that the decision had been purely economic.
‘‘I did not want to do this, but it is a business,’’ he said. The magazine will lose money in 2010, he said, and ‘‘we don’t see a sustained path to profitability for Newsweek.’’ The decision comes as companies have been sloughing off and revamping other mass magazines. TV Guide was sold for $1 to a private equity firm, Businessweek was sold for $5 million in cash to Bloomberg and Reader’s Digest was given an editorial overhaul as it reduced circulation.
The circulations of Time and Newsweek now stand about where they were in 1966, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
‘‘Those magazines had much more stature in those days,’’ said Edward Kosner, who began at Newsweek in 1963 and was its editor in the late 1970s. ‘‘It was really important what was on the cover of Newsweek and whatwas on the cover of Time because it was what passed for the national press. They helped set the agenda; they helped make reputations.’’ ‘‘The era of mass is over, in some respect,’’ said Charles Whitaker, research chairman in magazine journalism at the school of journalism of Northwestern University, near Chicago. ‘‘The newsweeklies, for so long, have tried to be all things to all people, and that’s just not going to cut it in this highly niche, politically polarized, media-stratified environment that we live in today.’’ Jon Meacham, Newsweek’s editor since 2006, said the announcement was not a surprise. ‘‘In the sense that we are all in an existential crisis. It is not what I would call a stunning decision,’’ he said in an interview. ‘‘You would have to have been hopelessly Pollyannaish not to have suspected that there were fundamental shifts ahead.’’ But, he said, ‘‘I decline to accept that Newsweek in some form does not have a role to play going forward.’’ It was unclear who might bid.
Bloomberg, which just bought Businessweek, is not exploring a purchase, said a spokeswoman, Judith Czelusniak. Mr. Meacham said that he was considering putting together investors to buy the magazine and that he had received voicemail messages from two billionaires after the planned sale was announced.
Newsweek had operating losses of $28 million in 2009, 82 percent higher than the loss for the previous year of $15 million. Its revenue declined 27 percent, to $165 million in 2009, from $227 million in 2008, hurt by diminished advertising and subscription revenue.
Started in 1933, Newsweek was acquired by The Washington Post in 1961 after Benjamin C. Bradlee, then a Newsweek editor and later executive editor of The Post, persuaded The Post to buy it.
Newsweek under The Post became a political counterweight to the Republicanism of Time under Henry Luce. While Time took a conservative stance on the war in Vietnam and American culture, Newsweek ran more youth-oriented covers on the war, civil rights and pop culture stars like the Beatles (though ‘‘musically they are a near disaster,’’ the magazine said).
Mr. Kosner, the former editor, recalled weekly bouts of ‘‘controlled anxiety’’ over what Time would put on its cover.
On Monday mornings, on the advertising news page of The New York Times, ‘‘Time and Newsweek took out sort of quarter-page ads that showed the cover and everyone turned to that page on Monday mornings to see what each of them had done,’’ Mr. Kosner said.
Slowly, though, cable television news programs grew in number and popularity, and the instant news of the Internet rendered weekly summaries stale almost by definition. And the notion of a cultural common ground that Americans could all share was changing.
Newsweek’s circulation was 3.14 million in the first half of 2000. By the second half of 2009, that had dropped to 1.97 million. The circulation of Time, which is part of the Time Warner media giant, declined from 4.07 million to 3.33 million in the same period.
U.S. News & World Report, the alsoran newsweekly, decided in 2008 to abandon its weekly publication schedule and become a monthly.
At the same time, The Economist, which offered British-accented reports on business and economic news, and The Week, an unabashedly middlebrow summary of the weekly news that began publishing in the United States in 2001, were on the rise.
Before the Internet and before cable television news, what the newsweeklies put on their covers mattered.
As news becomes harder to sum up in a single cover, that era seems to be ending.
The Washington Post Co. announced Wednesday that it would sell Newsweek, raising questions about the future of that newsweekly, which was first published 77 years ago.
Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post Co., said in an interview that the decision had been purely economic.
‘‘I did not want to do this, but it is a business,’’ he said. The magazine will lose money in 2010, he said, and ‘‘we don’t see a sustained path to profitability for Newsweek.’’ The decision comes as companies have been sloughing off and revamping other mass magazines. TV Guide was sold for $1 to a private equity firm, Businessweek was sold for $5 million in cash to Bloomberg and Reader’s Digest was given an editorial overhaul as it reduced circulation.
The circulations of Time and Newsweek now stand about where they were in 1966, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
‘‘Those magazines had much more stature in those days,’’ said Edward Kosner, who began at Newsweek in 1963 and was its editor in the late 1970s. ‘‘It was really important what was on the cover of Newsweek and whatwas on the cover of Time because it was what passed for the national press. They helped set the agenda; they helped make reputations.’’ ‘‘The era of mass is over, in some respect,’’ said Charles Whitaker, research chairman in magazine journalism at the school of journalism of Northwestern University, near Chicago. ‘‘The newsweeklies, for so long, have tried to be all things to all people, and that’s just not going to cut it in this highly niche, politically polarized, media-stratified environment that we live in today.’’ Jon Meacham, Newsweek’s editor since 2006, said the announcement was not a surprise. ‘‘In the sense that we are all in an existential crisis. It is not what I would call a stunning decision,’’ he said in an interview. ‘‘You would have to have been hopelessly Pollyannaish not to have suspected that there were fundamental shifts ahead.’’ But, he said, ‘‘I decline to accept that Newsweek in some form does not have a role to play going forward.’’ It was unclear who might bid.
Bloomberg, which just bought Businessweek, is not exploring a purchase, said a spokeswoman, Judith Czelusniak. Mr. Meacham said that he was considering putting together investors to buy the magazine and that he had received voicemail messages from two billionaires after the planned sale was announced.
Newsweek had operating losses of $28 million in 2009, 82 percent higher than the loss for the previous year of $15 million. Its revenue declined 27 percent, to $165 million in 2009, from $227 million in 2008, hurt by diminished advertising and subscription revenue.
Started in 1933, Newsweek was acquired by The Washington Post in 1961 after Benjamin C. Bradlee, then a Newsweek editor and later executive editor of The Post, persuaded The Post to buy it.
Newsweek under The Post became a political counterweight to the Republicanism of Time under Henry Luce. While Time took a conservative stance on the war in Vietnam and American culture, Newsweek ran more youth-oriented covers on the war, civil rights and pop culture stars like the Beatles (though ‘‘musically they are a near disaster,’’ the magazine said).
Mr. Kosner, the former editor, recalled weekly bouts of ‘‘controlled anxiety’’ over what Time would put on its cover.
On Monday mornings, on the advertising news page of The New York Times, ‘‘Time and Newsweek took out sort of quarter-page ads that showed the cover and everyone turned to that page on Monday mornings to see what each of them had done,’’ Mr. Kosner said.
Slowly, though, cable television news programs grew in number and popularity, and the instant news of the Internet rendered weekly summaries stale almost by definition. And the notion of a cultural common ground that Americans could all share was changing.
Newsweek’s circulation was 3.14 million in the first half of 2000. By the second half of 2009, that had dropped to 1.97 million. The circulation of Time, which is part of the Time Warner media giant, declined from 4.07 million to 3.33 million in the same period.
U.S. News & World Report, the alsoran newsweekly, decided in 2008 to abandon its weekly publication schedule and become a monthly.
At the same time, The Economist, which offered British-accented reports on business and economic news, and The Week, an unabashedly middlebrow summary of the weekly news that began publishing in the United States in 2001, were on the rise.
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