Newsweek was my first print magazine subscription, my training wheel for parsing through political commentary. Although I would outgrow Newsweek for the likes of The New Yorker and The Atlantic, Newsweek will occupy a special spot in my heart, especially since the print magazine of my adolescence went defunct last year.
The magazine's functions were being supplanted by the seemingly boundless offerings of the Internet, but no one could blame Newsweek for a lack of effort. In 2010, Newsweek allied itself with The Daily Beast, one of the biggest Internet-only news sites. Proponents lauded the act as an innovative one, through which the journalist depth of Newsweek could merge with the versatility of the Daily Beast to attract a wide audience and yield a significant profit.
Counter to my initial hopes, the marriage instead created a terrible chimera, the Newsweek Daily Beast Company, which, under the leadership of Tina Brown, veered the already-liberal publication further down the political spectrum.
Baiting and controversial bylines such as "Why are Obama's Critics so Dumb" and "Barack Obama: The First Gay President," were soon not out of the ordinary. The chimera began to displace actual reporting with pages of pictures and celebrity reporting. It also did not help that the publication was losing some of its best writers to rival publications, like Fareed Zakaria, who moved to Time Magazine. After continuing to lose money and writers, Newsweek announced that starting in January, it would transition strictly to an all-digital format. The new publication would be called Newsweek Global, and cost $4.99 for a single copy or $24.99 for an annual subscription, a sad milestone for the 79-year-old company.
I bought the last print issue for the sake of nostalgia. The issue is chock full of advertising, a last, cheap slap in the face from a once-venerable print magazine. The cover seems almost lazy a black-and-white of what used to be the company's Manhattan office building, with #lastprintissue emblazoned across the cover in hot pink. Considering the fact that The Daily Beast's viewership traffic has grown 36 percent in the past year, the Twitter hashtag seems like an irreverent "adios" from the Internet world, the direct and indirect cause of print Newsweek's demise.
Newsweek's decline is symptomatic of the plight of print in general. While many print publications have already added a digital platform to complement their print issue, such as U.S. News and World Report, few print publications have successfully capitalized on their online content without completely giving themselves up to it. In 2010, The Atlantic posted its first profit in the last decade by taking advantage of web media through the individual websites of The Atlantic, Atlantic Wire and Atlantic Cities, all of which can be accessed for free and are updated constantly with timely articles from both print and web-only contributors. However, even the web articles of The Atlantic are not without blemish. Fact checking and spelling errors are all too common in articles being published in the increasingly competitive, digitally driven, 24-hour online news cycle.
With print magazines expanding into the digital platform arena, articles expire quickly. Instant news, now at the click of a button, caters to the fleeting attention of the casual online reader. As such, the quality of individual articles suffers because of the speed at which they are produced. This does not bode well for the future of long-form journalism.
As the format and the medium through which ideas are presented changes, so does its readership. As those born in the last decade of the second millennium, we find ourselves in a precarious position, as print is slowly but inexorably phased out in favor of online experiences and e-books. While we are able to transition without much difficulty, ours is one of the last generations that can fully grasp the nostalgia of having news delivered weekly in print and understand what we have lost in our transition to digital. While print journalism will never truly be gone, just as the radio is still with us today, the quality of reporting that was standard in print journalism has passed. While we have certainly gained greater quantity and access with the digital boom, stories are written at greater speed, often proactively, with the primary purpose of catching the online reader's attention rather than providing good, objective, long-form reporting. We, as one of the last generations to be caught between the analog and digital, must mentally brace ourselves to the increasing barrage of misinformation by becoming more aware and more picky about our future information diet.
