Mommy, What Was A Newsweekly?

Newsweek and Time magazines have both decided to stop trying to compete with "new media" to be the first with news, and to focus on being where you turn for in-depth commentary and reporting.

I think it is a good move, but it may have come a few years too late. Both newsweeklies are hoping to avoid what U.S. News & World Report decided to do - give up with the idea of being a weekly publication entirely.

Newsweek
has a circulation of about 2.7 million and expects to drop to almost 50% of that. It was at 3.5 million in 1988. Time’s circulation back then was almost 5 million, and it is now at 3.4 million.

Competition from other media, particularly online, and significant ad losses (down 20% for the first quarter of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008) in the magazine world parallels the problems in the newspaper industry.

Condé Nast's overly glossy business magazine, Portfolio, bit the dust with the May 09 issue. Its venerable old lady, Vogue, lost 30+% of its ad pages this year. (Though you might suspect that Teen Vogue would go first, if, in fact, teens are not print readers.) Even poor old Mad magazine, now part of DC Comics, has gone quarterly. And several magazines have given up on print editions but maintained a web presence. Portfolio, for example, still has a site as of now.

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