On Monday, The Washington Post Co. announced that it will sell Newsweek to stereo equipment magnate Sidney Harman, the husband of Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.). The terms of the deal were not disclosed, the AP reported, although The New York Times has it that Harman, ninety-one, “would pay $1 in exchange for absorbing Newsweek’s considerable financial liabilities.”
On Tuesday, The Daily Beast had the scoop on Newsweek’s finances, however. Having obtained a copy of the sixty-six-page sales memorandum that the Post Co. (which put the property up for sale in May) gave to prospective buyers, the site reported that the publication was even worse off than many thought:
Revenue dropped 38 percent between 2007 and 2009, to $165 million. Newsweek’s negligible operating loss (not including certain pension and early retirement changes) of $3 million in 2007 turned into a bloodbath: the business lost $32 million in 2008 and $39.5 million in 2009. Even after reducing headcount by 33 percent and slashing the number of issues printed and distributed to readers each week from 2.6 million to 1.5 million, the 2010 operating loss is still forecast at $20 million.
The Daily Beast surmised that the sales memo “paints the picture of a media property given to someone unequipped to fundamentally change its current trajectory.” Which raises the question: What is the value of a newsweekly in the current round-the-clock media environment? And what, if anything, can Harman do to make Newsweek the force that it once was?
I'd like to make the case for the value of a news weekly. I write for one, The Beverly Hills Courier, a community paper that covers breaking news, city politics, entertainment and events happening in this high-profile, small-town that most of the world is mesmerized by. No one covers this hyper-local focus like we do, and other weeklies like the Syracuse New Times and LA Weekly.
To get the best of Beverly Hills, follow me on twitter @mcaption : www.twitter.com/mcaption
#1 Posted by Adam Popescu, CJR on Tue 3 Aug 2010 at 07:33 PM
Even in the round-the-clock media environment, or better yet, particularly in the round-the-clock media environment, a newsweekly is valuable. If not for all, at least for some. Well, at least for me. I discovered halfway through Journalism School that I prefer a weekly news perspective to a daily one. I can always google whatever I'm interested in, and my daily travels on the Subway will keep me updated, whether I like it or not, on Britney Spears's latest adventures. But my choice of news-perspective is weekly not daily. I'm not sure Newsweek would want to base their business model on one frustrated journalist, but perhaps if we look outside JSchool we'll find more weekly-kind of consumers.
#2 Posted by Yoav Sivan, CJR on Tue 3 Aug 2010 at 10:38 PM
Columnist Rick Edmonds on why Newsweek should go non-profit: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=123&aid=188084
#3 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Wed 4 Aug 2010 at 10:30 AM
Re-posting a comment from Milton R. Benjamin on another Newsweek post elsewhere on the site, because it's that good:
"The only way to make a print publication a must-read today -- particularly a weekly publication -- is to provide information unavailable elsewhere. Back in the '70s when I was a Newsweek editor, the magazine had a large cadre of foreign correspondents deployed around the world, and was providing background, insight and perspective that readers were not getting from their daily papers. In this era of shrunken tv network and newspaper foreign staffs -- with most international news coming from correspondents based in a handful of global capitals -- a magazine with reach and depth could still provide insight from the many hotspots that are part of today's geopolitical mix. Or it could be one more publication providing fluff and entertainment for readers. Since the current Newsweek wasn't competitive doing the latter, perhaps it ought to consider trying the former."
#4 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Wed 4 Aug 2010 at 10:32 AM
Back in time (late 1800´s), in France, the folhetim that was a weekly summary of news was done on a half of the front page´s newspaper by notorious writers, it was the chronicle, and in those times only a writer could contextualize news with what was going on, history and predictions - reporters could not, and don´t exist for it. That´s what we need today in this fast environment, a summary of contextualized news & opinion, only possible after the dusty settle down at least a bit - after all facts are only the core of the true news, importante and vital but not enough.
#5 Posted by Luis Peazê, CJR on Wed 4 Aug 2010 at 10:41 AM
There is a value in the newsweekly format. THE WEEK and THE ECONOMIST do okay within that constraint. The trouble is that TIME and NEWSWEEK grew to be indistinguishable over the decades. The problem was underlined as far back as 1975 when both magazines ran cover stories on the then-little-known Bruce Springsteen. Unless you had a particularly favorite writer (Robert Hughes, George Will) at one or the other, there was no reason not to pick only one of the two. So both magazines shifted more and more to columns and other opinion pieces. With few exceptions, the columns read like orations Chris Matthews, pieced together. Both were hostile to the 'red state' half of the country - quite a large potential market to alienate. They also shared an insufferable desire to be hyper-hip - for a target audience that doesn't read and follow politics that closely. Both tried doing too many things that other publications or information sources did better - a little sports here, a lot of diet/celebrities/child-raising there. One of them had to go. I have a feeling NEWSWEEK will not rise again.
#6 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 4 Aug 2010 at 12:59 PM