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| A copy of Newsweek is seen at Joe's Smoke, Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012, in Portland, Maine. Newsweek announced Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012 that it will end its print publication after 80 years and shift to an all-digital format in early 2013. Its last U.S. print edition will be its Dec. 31 issue. The paper version of Newsweek is the latest casualty of a changing world where readers get more of their information from websites, tablets and smartphones. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- There was a time when the newsweeklies set the agenda for the
nation's conversation - when Time and Newsweek would digest the events
of the week and Americans would wait by their mailboxes to see what was
on the covers.
Those days have passed, and
come the end of the year, the print edition of Newsweek will pass, too.
Cause of death: The march of time.
"The tempo
of the news and the Web have completely overtaken the news magazines,"
said Stephen G. Smith, editor of the Washington Examiner and the holder
of an unprecedented newsweekly triple crown - nation editor at Time,
editor of U.S. News and World Report, and executive editor of Newsweek
from 1986 to 1991.
Where once readers were
content to sit back and wait for tempered accounts of domestic and
foreign events, they now can find much of what they need almost
instantaneously, on their smartphones. Where once advertisers had
limited places to spend their dollars to reach national audiences, they
now have seemingly unlimited alternatives.
So
on Thursday, when Newsweek's current owners announced they intended to
halt print publication and expand the magazine's Web presence, there was
little surprise. But there was a good deal of nostalgia for what Smith
called "the shared conversation that the nation used to have," when the
networks, the newsweeklies and a few national newspapers reigned.
Before
Newsweek, there was Time - the brainchild of Henry Luce and Briton
Hadden. The first issue of the first newsweekly came out in 1923, and
the formula, from the first, was to wrap up the week's news and tie it
with a bow, telling it with a singular voice.
Newsweek
- or as it was originally called, News-week - came along in 1933. The
founding editor was Thomas Martyn. The first foreign editor of Time, he
was British-born and had a single leg, having lost the other in World
War I. His magazine sold for 10 cents and was advertised as "an
indispensable complement to newspaper reading, because it explains,
expounds, clarifies."
The magazine struggled
for four years, until it merged with another magazine, Today, lost the
hyphen, and emerged under the ownership of Averill Harriman and Vincent
Astor, two of the country's wealthiest men.
The
modern era at Newsweek began in 1961, when it was purchased by the
Washington Post Co. Benjamin Bradlee, who was Newsweek's Washington
bureau chief at the time and later executive editor of the Post, helped
negotiate the sale.
Edward Kosner, who worked
at Newsweek from 1963 to 1979, ending as executive editor, recalled the
time as a kind of golden age of the newsweeklies.
"It's a lost world," he said. "It's like talking about the 19th century.
"Everybody
cared about what was on the cover Monday morning. People took the
magazines very, very seriously. They were important. They were
influential."
Richard M. Smith joined Newsweek
for a two-week writing tryout in 1970 and stayed until 2007, rising to
executive editor before retiring as president and chief executive
officer. Newsweek was always the scrappy competitor to Time, which grew
to a corporate behemoth with numerous magazines and media properties and
had the larger circulation; Smith said he and his colleagues preferred
to think of themselves as "the noble guerrilla band, fighting the
`panzer division on Sixth Avenue.' We took pride in our speed and
flexibility and occasional irreverence."
He
recalled with pride Newsweek's coverage of civil rights in the 1960s,
the end of the Vietnam War and economic issues in the 1970s, the AIDS
epidemic in the 1980s.
Perhaps because of
Time's Luceian origins - he and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, were major
Republican figures - Newsweek was often perceived as a more liberal
counterweight. Its readers loved the weekly Periscope section, with its
editorial cartoons and hot-off-the-presses news blurbs. Where Time only
later started providing bylines for its stories, Newsweek offered star
columnists like George Will, Eleanor Clift and Anna Quindlen.
Life
in the newsweeklies, Stephen Smith recalls, was nothing like today's
frenetic media sprint. At the start of each week, reporters would come
into work for a couple of days and think about story ideas and how to
pitch them. The correspondents were far flung; the editing and
fact-checking were meticulous.
"That world doesn't exist anymore," he said.
The
magazines have tried to adjust. They do not rehash the week's events as
they once did. They offer more opinion, more analysis.
Newsweek
often struggled over the years, and the Post sold it to stereo
equipment magnate Sidney Harman in 2010 for $1. He died the next year,
but not before the magazine was joined to The Daily Beast Web operation.
The
cost of maintaining a network of correspondents has risen dramatically,
along with the costs of printing and postage. Meanwhile, Newsweek's
circulation dropped from 3.14 million in 2000 to 1.5 million in 2012.
Time, too, has dropped, but not as precipitously, from 4.2 million in
1997 to 3.38 million now.
Other newsweeklies
have done better: The Economist, with its upscale readership, went from
less than 1 million in 2000 to 1.5 million in 2012, and The Week also
has made gains.
Regardless, it is clear that the golden age of newsweeklies will not return.
Kosner
recalled a time when there might be a presidential debate on a Tuesday
night, and his readers would eagerly await the arrival of the next issue
of Newsweek - five days later - to find out the story behind the story,
to hear what the newsmagazine had to say about what had happened. Now,
he says, they merely go to CNN, or log on to Slate.
"Time marches on," he said.
But for how long?
