Newsweek Plans Makeover to Fit a Smaller Audience
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Newsweek is planning a redesign and some shifts in content to fashion an opinionated take on events, aimed at a much smaller, and wealthier, readership.
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: February 8, 2009
When US Airways Flight 1549 glided safely onto the Hudson River last month, Newsweek did what news organizations have done for more than a century — it sent reporters and photographers to the scene.
Considerable effort yielded a modest article on Newsweek’s Web site, and nothing in the printed magazine.
If a similar episode happens six months from now, editors say, Newsweek probably will not even bother.
Newsweek is about to begin a major change in its identity, with a new design, a much smaller and, it hopes, more affluent readership, and some shifts in content. The venerable newsweekly’s ingrained role of obligatory coverage of the week’s big events will be abandoned once and for all, executives say.
“There’s a phrase in the culture, ‘we need to take note of,’ ‘we need to weigh in on,’ ” said Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham. “That’s going away. If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.”
Newsweek loses money, and the consensus within its parent, the Washington Post Company, and among industry analysts, is that it has to try something big. The magazine is betting that the answer lies in changing both itself and its audience, and getting the audience to pay more.
A deep-rooted part of the newsweekly culture has been to serve a mass audience, but that market has been shrinking, and new subscribers come at a high price in call centers, advertising and deeply discounted subscriptions.
“Mass for us is a business that doesn’t work,” said Tom Ascheim, Newsweek’s chief executive. “Wish it did, but it doesn’t. We did it for a long time, successfully, but we can’t anymore.”
Thirteen months ago, Newsweek lowered its rate base, the circulation promised to advertisers, to 2.6 million from 3.1 million, and Mr. Ascheim said that would drop to 1.9 million in July, and to 1.5 million next January.
He says the magazine has a core of 1.2 million subscribers who are its best-educated, most avid consumers of news, and who have higher incomes than the average reader.
“We would like to build our business around these people and grow that group slightly,” he said. “These are our best customers. They are our best renewers, and they pay the most.”
In the first half of 2008, the average Newsweek subscriber paid less than $25 a year, or 47 cents for each copy — less than one-tenth the $4.95 newsstand price. Newsweek wants to raise that average to $50 a year, Mr. Ascheim said, adding, “If you can’t get people to pay for what they love, we’re all out of business.”
From their invention, newsweeklies have been under assault by quicker media, forcing them to ease away from the “what,” toward the “how” and “why,” and more recently, to “here’s what to do about it.” For decades, the magazines evolved quickly enough to keep huge readership and healthy profits.
But in the last couple of years, circulation and advertising have plunged, and the weeklies have cut news staffs. Time magazine, the nation’s first and largest newsweekly, remains profitable, though its sales are down, too, but Newsweek is struggling and U.S. News & World Report has become a monthly.
Editorially, Newsweek’s plan calls for moving in the direction it was already headed — toward not just analysis and commentary, but an opinionated, prescriptive or offbeat take on events.
The current cover article argues that America’s involvement in Afghanistan parallels the Vietnam War, and a companion piece offers a plan for handling that country. Newsweek also plans to lean even more heavily on the appeal of big-name writers like Christopher Hitchens, Fareed Zakaria and George Will.
Starting in May, articles will be reorganized under four broad, new sections — one each for short takes, columnists and commentary, long reporting pieces like the cover articles, and culture — each with less compulsion to touch on the week’s biggest events. A new graphic feature on the last page, “The Bluffer’s Guide,” will tell readers how to sound as if they are knowledgeable on a current topic, whether they are or not. ...
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