about  /   archives  /   contact  /   subscribe  /   twitter    
Share this entry
Make this entry better

What are we missing? Is there a key link we skipped, or a part of the story we got wrong?

Let us know — we’re counting on you to help Encyclo get better.

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Key links:
Primary website:
newsweek.com
Primary Twitter:
@newsweek

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

Newsweek is a newsweekly magazine that was once the second-largest newsweekly in the United States.

The magazine is owned by IBT Media, owners of the International Business Times and a company with connections to a controversial pastor named David Jang. It has gone through several owners in recent years: The site had been bought from The Washington Post Co. in 2010 by Sidney Harman, who quickly merged it with Barry Diller‘s Internet company IAC, owner of the news site The Daily Beast. Harman ended his investment in the magazine in 2012, and IAC sold it to IBT in 2013.

Newsweek’s print edition folded in December 2012, replaced by a subscription-based digital product in conjunction with The Daily Beast, as the company was renamed NewsBeast. It planned to initially offer its website for free without ads, eventually introducing both ads and a metered-model paywall, which was revamped in 2014. Newsweek relaunched its print edition in March 2014, charging $7.99 per copy with a circulation of 70,000, compared with its peak circulation of 3.3 million. The revamped print edition makes its money primarily from subscriptions and newsstand sales rather than advertising. Newsweek had a newsroom of about 40 in early 2014 and planned to push its size to 50 by the end of the year.

In addition to its U.S. edition, Newsweek also published three English-language editions — for the Atlantic, Asia, and Latin America — and it is the only newsmagazine with global, weekly local-language editions (twelve in all). In June of 2000, Newsweek International launched Newsweek In Arabic; in 2002, Newsweek launched Newsweek Select, distributed in Hong Kong and mainland China.

Newsweek was founded by Thomas J.C. Martyn, a former foreign editor at Time magazine, and was first published on February 17, 1933. The cover of its first issue (titled, at the time, “News-Week”) featured seven photographs from the week’s news. A subscription cost $4 for the year, and the magazine had a circulation of 50,000. In 1961, Newsweek was bought by The Washington Post Company, which maintained ownership of the magazine until August 2010.

Newsweek saw its circulation — and, thus, its subscription and ad revenue — decline steeply in its past several years. At the end of 2007, the magazine reduced its U.S. base rate from 3.1 million to 2.6 million. In July of 2009, Newsweek dropped to a base of 1.9 million. In January 2010, it dropped to 1.5 million.

In May of 2009, then-editor Jon Meacham rolled out an ambitious plan to revamp Newsweek into a “smarter” product that would cater to a more elite audience than it had in the past — essentially, to make Newsweek more like The Economist, a still-successful newsweekly magazine. The goal was a smaller circulation base but a more elite audience, who would both pay more for their subscriptions and attract more advertising dollars. But Newsweek still ended up reporting an operating loss of $28.1 million in 2009, which was 82.5 percent higher than the previous year’s loss of $15.4 million.

In August of 2010, it was announced that The Washington Post Company would sell Newsweek to 92-year-old audio pioneer Sidney Harman — reportedly for a purchase price of $1.00 and an assumption of more than $50 million in liabilities from The Post Company. Meacham stepped down as Newsweek’s editor once the sale was complete, moving to an editorship at Random House.

In November of 2010, it was announced that Newsweek and the news website The Daily Beast would merge operations to create a new entity, The Newsweek Daily Beast Company (which media watchers often abbreviate to “NewsBeast”), with The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown serving as Newsweek’s new editor. (The first issue of the print magazine under her editorship debuted in March 2011, to mixed reviews.) In July 2011, the company’s owner, Barry Diller, estimated the cost of the merger at $50 million. Later that year, it was reported that Newsweek had lost $30 million in 2010 and was on pace to lose $20 million in 2011.

Under Brown, the magazine was repeatedly accused of producing incendiary covers to try to draw pageviews and newsstand sales.

Newsweek and the Daily Beast partnered with NBC News for digital coverage of the 2012 campaigns.

Video

The Atlantic’s Michael Hirschorn discusses his article “Twilight of the Newsweeklies“:

Peers, allies, & competitors:
Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
Nov. 1, 2019 / Joshua Benton
Watch your language: “Data voids” on the web have opened a door to manipulators and other disinformation pushers — One day fifteen long years ago, in 2004, some SEO consultants decided to have a contest to determine quién es más macho in the gaming-search-results game. As they put it: “Are you a Player or a Stayer?” Eve...
March 23, 2016 / Joseph Lichterman
Testing its pay-per-article model in English, Blendle launches in the United States with 20 publishers — Blendle, the Dutch platform that lets users pay by the article, launched in a limited beta in the United States on Wednesday by partnering with 20 outlets — including premium publishers like The New York Times, The Wal...
March 1, 2016 / Joseph Lichterman, Laura Hazard Owen, and Shan Wang
This just in: How 9 news organizations are reporting election results live on the web — ’Tis the season of colorful speeches, embarrassing (campaign-destroying) tweets, and unbelievable victories. Will Hillary Clinton come out strong over Bernie Sanders in the South, or is Sanders making inroads with mino...
Oct. 19, 2015 / Justin Ellis
What’s actually working in digital advertising? 8 publishers on how they’re bringing in money — Many publishers’ digital revenues have been on an upward swing in recent years — but it’s not enough to fill the gaps left by print. According to eMarketer, global digital ad spending in 2015 is expected to...
March 21, 2014 / Mark Coddington
This Week in Review: Nate Silver and data journalism’s critics, and the roots of diversity problems — High expectations for FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver relaunched his data-driven blog, FiveThirtyEight, this week under the auspices of ESPN as a full-blown data journalism site covering sports, politics, economics, scienc...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Megan Garber. Main text last updated: August 21, 2014.
Make this entry better
How could this entry improve? What's missing, unclear, or wrong?
Name (optional)
Email (optional)
Explore: CNN
CNN logo

CNN is an American television news network, the first 24-hour news channel on television. CNN is owned by the media conglomerate Time Warner, under the Turner Broadcasting division. It includes a number of specialized channels, including HLN (formerly known as Headline News), and CNN International. CNN was founded in 1980 and soon became extremely influential…

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Encyclo is made possible by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.
Some rights reserved. Copyright information »