Turning a Page: Newsweek Ends Print Run

Concepts: new media ecosystem; business of the media; audience preferences;  multimodals

Newsweek magazine had ended its long time print rivalry with Times to an online-only format (Daniel & Hagey 2012). The magazine is now part of the news and commentary site of The Daily Beast (Daniel & Hagey 2012). Tina Brown who was the editor of the magazine is now the editor of Daily Beast and Newsweek Global controlled by the magazine's old headquarters IAC/Interactive Corp (Daniel & Hagey 2012).

This is a significant sign that the demand for traditional print medias are being threatened by multimodal print online (Daniel & Hagey 2012). Newsweek's losses had reached approximately $40 million annually with a circulation drop of half to 1.5 million and advertising pages plunged more than 80% (Daniel & Hagey 2012). Daily Beast acts as a promotional platform for Newsweek and had grown 36% in the past year to five million unique visitors monthly (Daniel & Hagey 2012). Ms. Brown assured that “even in the digital form the cover will still play the same role it has as a wonderful marketplace of ideas” (Daniel & Hagey 2012).

According to Kres (2006), the writing trend involves close relationship with typeface choices and layout. “Newspaper, magazine and many other kind of texts are no longer just written but ‘designed’ and multimodally articulated” (Kres 2006, p. 187). I personally think with new invention of technology such as smart phone and tablet, the internet has accelerated the downward spiral of print-based media. Internet provides a platform for people to have access to all sorts of information (Naughton 2006). Computer mediated communications are one of the best examples (Lister 2009). This was caused by the handiness of devices as well as the fast-moving lifestyle that urban people are living, people nowadays get in touch with people around the world through email, Facetime and etc; Everything is demanded based on its easy accessibility. Hence, the demand of online-only magazine is unexceptionally high. For example, the US News & World Report which went online in 2008 has yielded a relatively high profit with 180 staff members in the company according to its editor Brian Kelly (Daniel & Hagey 2012).

Reference List

Daniel, R & Hagey, K 2012, ‘Turning a Page: Newsweek Ends Print Run’, The Wall Street Journal, viewed 9 June 2013, <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324660404578201432812202750.html>.

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 2006, Reading images.

Lister, M 2009, New media: A critical introduction, Taylor & Francis US.

Naughton, J 2006, ‘Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem’, University of Oxford, vol. 8

Walsh, M 2006, ‘Textual shift: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,’ Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no.1, p.24-37.