Wanna buy a newsmagazine (one that is only online, that is)?
Newsweek CEO Baba Shetty and editor-in-chief Tina Brown have sent a memo to staff confirming earlier reports that parent-company IAC is exploring a sale of the now online-only magazine.
In the memo, Shetty and Brown attributed the exploration of a sale to a desire to focus their full attention on The Daily Beast, Newsweek’s sister website.
“The simple reason is focus. Newsweek is a powerful brand, but its demands have taken attention and focus away from The Daily Beast,” they wrote. “The story that hasn’t been told about The Daily Beast is its strength. Deidre Depke and her team have earned the Webby for Best News site for two years running. Our traffic is up significantly yet again this year. And digital ad sales in a very tough environment are up 30% year to date.”
The news comes five months after Newsweek folded its print edition, and one month after IAC chief Barry Diller expressed regret about buying the magazine.
“‘I wish I hadn’t bought Newsweek, it was a mistake,” he told Bloomberg TV in late April, adding that he did not have “great expectations” for the digital version.
The bottom line is that it’s hard for a print news magazine that has as its product original reporting to compete in these days of the Internet, cable news, talk radio and cell phones linked to the Internet.
I’ve always been a HUGE fan of Newsweek and Time. And I have a long history with them — but not as a staffer.
I grew up on reading both. My father Richard Gandelman did a lot of printing for Time-Life but he also got Newsweek. He took me along on some trips to the Time-Life building and a key executive in charge of Time-Life books often visited our house.
When I lived in Spain from May 1975 – December 1978, before I became The Christian Science Monitor’s “Special Correspondent” (a special title for a kind of super stringer who filed several times a week so they never had to send in a staffer) the Newsweek bureau paid me in to help out on their Madrid team’s coverage of dictator Francisco Franco’s controversial last months when he executed some Basque separatists. I was in Plaza del Oriente when he gave his famous last public speech (warning among other things about the Masons). I also helped on some stories in the aftermath of his death including one I did for the Monitor and other publicans: about the ban on Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator finally being lifted and how when Spaniards heard Chaplin’s speech about liberty at the end they stood up and cheered.
Later, in 2008, Newsweek selected The Moderate Voice to be one of several blogs to run its content on the Newsweek site as part of a special election year group blog called The Ruckus.
I viewed Newsweek merging with The Daily Beast as the beginning of the end for Newsweek — and this latest news to be pretty much the end. It’s hard to see who’d buy it and keep the same zippy writing and strict journalistic standards that The Daily Beast tried to keep on Newsweek and that it maintains on the ever improving Daily Beast.
So far the Koch Brothers are drooling over newspapers for sale. (So far..)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.