The Crossed Pond

Interesting news. Newsweek and Time, like many publications, have been struggling lately—both are, as far as I’m aware, still profitable, but both are feeling the same crunch that newspapers are. Both, in response, have grown increasingly inclined towards blurb journalism—a bit more edutainment, many more panels, pictures, and pull-quotes, shorter form articles, middling op-ed, and in general publishing as the magazine equivalent of the CNN crawl. But even then, subscriptions have gone down and although I wouldn’t describe it as bad, it hasn’t exactly been full of bell-ringing insight and journalistic street cred.

So Newsweek has decided to take a bold step. They’re going to change their business model with the explicit goal of cutting their subscriptions in half. That may sound nutty on first blush, but as Justin Gardner recalls, there’s an old saying in business: if you can double your price and lose less than half of your customers, you should do it. It’s that premise on which the new Newsweek will rest, and in addition they’ll be one of the first dead tree edition magazines who will go the other way in trying to compete for attention with online sources (and each other)—namely, they’ll move away from blurby recaps.

That step — along with a redesigned, revamped publication that hits newsstands today — may well determine whether the 76-year-old newsmagazine survives. Newsweek will concentrate on two things — reporting and argument — while kissing off any recap of the week’s developments.

Time has been gravitating in that direction as well. But Newsweek, owned by The Washington Post Co., is accelerating the process because it is bleeding red ink, losing nearly $20 million in the first quarter. Newsweek, whose circulation was as high as 3.1 million in recent years, plans to cut that to 1.5 million by the beginning of 2010, in part by discouraging renewals. The magazine will begin charging the average subscriber about 90 cents an issue, nearly double the current rate.

“If we can’t convince a million and a half people we’re worth less than a dollar a week, the market will have spoken,” [editor] Meacham says. The newsstand price will also jump from $4.95 to $5.95, a buck more than Time.

The new layout, with larger photographs, splits each issue into four parts: Scope (News, Scoops and the Globe at a Glance); Features; The Take (What We Think About the World); and The Culture. Meacham, an admirer of the Economist, is fashioning a serious magazine for what he calls his base, with a heavy emphasis on politics and public policy.

Time, interestingly, is following the lead, also raising subscription prices and moving towards less of a mass audience format.

How drastic a change this will be remains to be seen—probably not too drastic. But it is, in my opinion, a hopeful sign. There’s one thing that magazines and newspapers still have over blogs—long attention spans (dedicated staffs and budgets don’t hurt either). There is still a niche for investigative journalism and conversation-setting thoughtfulness. So instead of trying to compete with blogs for up-to-the-minute news, re-staking out that territory might prove a smart move. Or maybe not—there is still a need for what my Texan friends like to call “shitter reads”, what I might call airport journalism. But it is a ballsy, and I think admirable, attempt on Newsweek’s part to try to find it’s way in the changing media landscape.