Later today, reports Portfolio‘s Jeff Bercovici, U.S. News & World Report will be rolling out a weekly digital digest:
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the decline and fall of newsweeklies, some of it fueled by the shift of U.S. News & World Report to biweekly, and then monthly, publication. But U.S. News hasn’t given up on the idea of the weekly news digest. In fact, later today, in a soft launch, it will rolling out a new product: a “digital newsweekly” that reproduces, in pixels, what the magazine once did in ink and paper.
“We’re creating a tailored product for readers that does what the old newsweeklies did, which was to stop time for people and say ‘What the heck happened over the last week?’ and make sense of it,” says editor Brian Kelly.
The new “publication” will be less feature-y than the print U.S. News magazine, Kelly told Bercovici, and more focused on Washington events, politics, and policy.
And–TimesSelect alert!–the digest will be a premium product on U.S. News‘s Web site: A one-year subscription will cost $19.95 (although subscribers to U.S. News & World Report, Bercovici notes, will be able to download it for free). The digest, after today’s late soft launch, will normally go online around noon each Friday.
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.