Newsweek is Dead, Long Live NewsBeast?

This morning the New York Times announced that Newsweek would cease publishing the print version of its magazine in December. Is this the end of an era or the beginning of a new one? Should we feel happy, sad or indifferent?

Did Innovation, (like the iPad) kill Newsweek?

Two years ago, Newsweek, in  prelude to today's announcement had already merged with the online News Magazine, the Daily Beast (actually Daily Beast bought it for $1 dollar in 2010). Now, this merged online entity will be all that's left of the Newsweek brand. However, if you happen to visit the newly merged NewsBeast it seems a lot more Beast and a lot less Week. It doesn't even have its own dedicated Newsweek URL and the format looks little like a magazine and much more like a blog (which is closer to the core Newsbeast format and somewhat similar to Huffington Post but without so many pesky mini-blogs).

So what happened to Newsweek? What has led it to this juncture? Is there any hope that something like Newsweek will reemerge from the belly of NewsBeast?

First, let's look at the "why." While many folks seem to blaming recent management of the magazine, the reasons why Newsweek failed go back much further. Anyone in the print media business could see clearly in the late 1990's that the traditional print business model was on its way to extinction. That's not just because more people were going online to get their news - it's also because of the massive overhead associated with producing either daily papers or weekly magazines. There was very little profit margin to begin with and the instant that ads began peeling away from print and into online sites like Craig's List or even Ebay that was it - game over. It was only a matter of time before the traditional model collapsed because the revenue stream had been diverted.

So, how come the folks at Newsweek are now essentially out of business? There was a Newsweek.com at least until 2010. Didn't they (and the they in this case is the Washington Post Company) do what they needed to do to save the magazine and the brand? In a word, no. Here's what they did do:

• They launched their site at the right time, 1998 but starved it.
• They considered their print business an online business to be different and possibly mutually exclusive business entities, running under different business models.
• They failed to devise a transition strategy that would have moved the print model over to the online model in an orderly fashion - without that strategy they were prone to make some really terrible decisions.

 What were those decisions?

1. Selling Newsweek for a dollar despite having one of the strongest global brands in journalism.
2. Merging Newsweek.com with daily beast and shutting down the URL. They managed to lose the magazine and brand in one fell swoop with that decision. 
3. Finally, shutting down the magazine (this year) with essentially nowhere to go for the loyal readers - in effect they've committed brand suicide.

What could have been done differently? Well, here's some thoughts:

• The owners of Newsweek could have gradually invested more in its online future, making that its strategic priority.
• They could have viewed the Internet as an opportunity to redefine their business model, through partnerships and through media convergence. For example, why didn't they launch Newsweek online radio or video segments? Why not try more interactive approaches w/ Blogs like the company that bought them out? All of this boils down to an inability to provide a vision regarding what magazines ought to become in the 21st century. Instead of leading that charge, Newsweek was buried under it.

So, is the death of Newsweek a bad thing? Perhaps not so bad but disappointing; there was so much potential for it and to some extent it had taken steps towards realizing that potential (with millions of online viewers by 2010). However, the vision that was needed to move from a proof of concept to a new reality never materialized. 

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