WHY  NEWSWEEK  CLOSED  ITS  PRINT  MAGAZINE:

The Indian Print Media Need Not Be Scared But Be Prudent…    

We are transforming ‘Newsweek’, not saying goodbye to it”, the famous quote was written by editor-in-chief Tina Brown while confirming the close down of the 70+ odd year old nanny of the print publications around the world.  

               From the start, it was an unwieldy melding of two newsrooms: a legacy print magazine, Newsweek, combined with an irreverent digital news site, The Daily Beast. It had high-profile ownership, first in Sidney Harman and then in Barry Diller, and it was held together by experienced magazine editor Tina Brown, looking for one more big hit on her resume. But, Newsweek buckled under the pressure afflicting the magazine industry in general and news weeklies in particular, with their outdated print cycles that have been overtaken by the internet.

                In a message posted on The Daily Beast, Brown announced that Newsweek would cease print publication at the end of the year and move to an all-digital format. The transition, she wrote, would include layoffs, and at a staff meeting, she grew teary-eyed when she told employees that she didn't know how many people would be let go.

                The staff remaining will publish a digital magazine called Newsweek Global. Readers will continue to pay for Newsweek, Brown said, and some Newsweek articles will appear on The Daily Beast, which will continue as a free website. The end of the print edition will help stem Newsweek's estimated $40 million in annual losses.

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Bowing to the inevitable

Founded in 1933, Newsweek established a venerable place in the US media landscape, competing ferociously with Time magazine week in and week out to bring the top news stories to several million readers. In the pre-internet era, before a constant stream of real-time information was available, readers eagerly awaited the two magazines to see which cover stories they would feature - and whether they would be the same ones. Brown characterized the move as bowing to the inevitable digital future.

                   "You cannot actually change an era of enormous disruptive innovation," she said in a phone interview. "No one single person can reverse that trend. You can't turn back what is an inexorable trend." But behind the scenes, current and former employees say, there were tensions that led to an increasingly tumultuous newsroom, as financial losses mounted and Brown struggled to integrate the two operations and maintain Newsweek's relevance.

'Gay president'

Despite her best efforts to take a flagging product and rejuvenate it, much of what she tried fell flat, and her attempts to create buzz with cover articles that discussed sex addiction and called President Barack Obama "the first gay president" resulted mostly in puzzlement and, sometimes, ridicule.

                        Brown would tear up long-planned issues at the last moment, according to a staff member involved in production, who declined to speak on the record because of the impending layoffs. That left the art department scrambling to come up with something to illustrate her next big idea.

                      "That's how we ended up with that asparagus cover from stock photos," the employee said, referring to a cover showing a piece of asparagus dangling above a woman's lips, which was widely derided by media commentators. "Though I have to say on her behalf, that cover did very well." Brown defended her choice of covers.  "The magazine was incredibly moribund when we came in," she said. "It had taken so many knocks. We have been able to bring Newsweek back to relevance. I have always felt that the covers are about a conversation. The covers become a conversation starter."

 

Blended family

Many of the problems began in 2010 with the sale of Newsweek to Harman, a 92-year-old audio magnate who died last year. He bought the magazine from the Washington Post. for a dollar and merged it with The Daily Beast, the website owned by Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp. But the blending of the two brands failed, in part because no real integration took place. 

                             "In spite of the rhetoric at the start, there never really was a merger between The Daily Beastand Newsweek," said one editor who worked on both. He and other current and former employees said the magazine had failed to absorb the energy and freshness of The Daily Beast.

                                  "No one works harder than Tina, and she paid as much attention to a cutline on a picture as she did with the cover, but I think she failed to rely on some of the people around her," said a staff member who left recently but requested anonymity because he remains friendly with Brown. "With The Daily Beast, she was very open to input from everyone, but it was very much the opposite with the magazine. Many of the young people at The Daily Beast were shut out, and she went with writers and topics that seemed plucked from the 1980s."

 

Tina's arena

Brown, first at Vanity Fair and then at The New Yorker, successfully blended politics and celebrity, high and low, into magazines that were talked about and read. But at Talk, the magazine began in a partnership between Miramax and Hearst, her mid-Atlantic sensibilities seemed out of tune, and Talk was forced to shut down. Her focus on Princess Diana — featured on a cover in a digitally aged, somewhat ghoulish rendering — and her tendency to treat the Clintons and the Kennedys as American royalty seemed out of step with a public focused on politicians' feet of clay. Magazine industry experts say it is not fair to blame Brown for all of Newsweek's problems. She fought a losing battle for a magazine whose circulation peaked in 1991 at 3.3 million but was down to 1.5 million in June. 

                                  While advertising pages and revenue grew modestly, it brought in a fraction of the money earned by rivals such as Time. Also, Newsweek has not had the resources that benefit magazines like Time, which is part of a huge magazine empire that can withstand losses. "Newsweek has had two highly talented editors — Tina Brown and, before her, Jon Meacham - and it illustrates that it is not an editorial problem," said Fareed Zakaria, a former editor of Newsweek International. "It is a larger business problem."

 

No choice

Reached on a plane about to depart Mexico City, Diller said there was little choice but to end the print magazine once the Harman family decided this summer to withdraw financial support. "It was a mistake to take this one on," Diller said.

                                  Newsweek will have about 500 pages in advertising this year, he said, "which was not sustainable. It became completely self-evident that we couldn't print the magazine anymore." He said of Brown, "She has done an amazing job, and I have every confidence in her." Brown said the company did not shut down Newsweek entirely because it has an "enormously strong" brand. It still has foreign print licenses in Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland and South Korea, and is negotiating two new licenses in Asia. The decision to end the print edition "was always going to happen," Brown said. "It really has not been a question of if," she said. "It was a question of when."

 

THE FUTURE FOR - India Today, Outlook, Week, Time Magazine

In the near future, India Today, Outlook and Week, will have no option but to scale down print circulation. The problem here in India is that there is substantially less advertising available now for digital versions with a lot of educating still left to do. The revenue of the internet version of a newspaper gets in one year, might in some cases equal the advertising that the print edition gets in two or three days. That though, maybe changing fast with more online version running focused ad teams.

                                 Time magazine is also not in a good shape. The reason, as a senior editor of Time magazine told this reporter three months back, is that since the genre (news and current affairs as weekly print editions) is being over-run by digital.

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Hara-Kiri: Wrong Management decisions - From a point of view of a Professional Global Media Analyst

Conclusion: Looking at the vast investments, Newsweek spent $222 million a year, including $2 million on more than 300 employees. Production, circulation, etc accounted for $ 102 million. And, print was also more than 85-90%, from where their revenues came from. So, it was predictable that Newsweek felt more pinch from it as they did not tune in with time, ignoring the writing on the wall; ultimately later on it was too late. 

                         Instead of closing down its Newsweek, could have optionally converted the magazine in to a quarterly  It printed 48 times a year, as opposed to average 12 times per year. And, their recent decision of allowing digital version of the magazine for free, they have committed hara-kiri by allowing digital version on paid subscription fees only. It is like landing on sizzling hot fry pan! Instead of pruning their print business, they have already closed down their company gates on the readers, even before their digital business takes-off… And, the best writers will not like to be behind the pay wall, unless Newsweek global network dishes out something so great that they hold its monopoly!                                             

               No wonder digitalization is happening in India, but the real figures speak a sad story in a country which is world’s IT hub! Frankly, online accessibility in India can’t be compared to Europe & US for that matter as it will take another 10 years for even 50% of our population to read a newspaper online; surely if that catches up it will be the best value worth for an advertiser. It is also a habit formation, you tell me how many internet savvy readers (given a choice) would like to read the e-version of a Times Of India, Hindustan or even DNA newspapers even when they are available online? Only the educated lot will uncomfortably read it to impress upon their peers, many a times simply as a style statement. Television media no doubt makes is hailed as the best media but how much money of the advertiser goes down the drains, so the wastage element is enormous here, and inspite of the noise made by this medium (also crore of rupee drained every year), is there a mechanism to check conversions or the effectiveness of this medium. The clever publishers will not just be in online, but have a mixed strategy to serve both – print + online.

                Finally, on the managing cost part, a lean-mean machine equipped with online fire-power can sure grab a readers eye balls!  Else, any elephant could fall terribly!

 

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