Newsweek, its print version left for dead, sprang back to life late last week with a relaunch whose cover story attracted lots of attention — and triggered lots of controversy. More on that later.
And Time, the reigning champion in what's left of the field, last week launched a much-delayed and much-needed digital overhaul.
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Which raises a question: Is there a future for these vestiges of the pre-digital world?
The newsweeklies' stock-in-trade used to be summing up the events of the previous week, putting them in context, providing insight. But newspapers long ago started producing far more, well, magazine-like content. Now smart, up-to-to-the minute commentary and analysis as well as more expansive long-form journalism can be found all over the Web.
U.S. News & World Report dumped its print edition in 2010 and Newsweek followed suit two years later. Time endures but continues to struggle for relevancy in a crowded, brutally competitive media landscape.
So is it completely insane for Newsweek, owned by relative newcomer IBT Media, to plunge back into print's murky waters?
Not necessarily, says the man so obsessed with magazines that he trademarked Mr. Magazine as his nickname.
Samir Husni, founder and director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi, is serenely untroubled by the print-is-dead drumbeat we've all heard for years. Husni thinks this is a great time for journalism in general and magazines in particular. He loves the fact that a number of digital outlets, Politico among them, have started up print magazines.
"The marketplace is sending the signal that there is value in print, that there is money in print," he says.
But, Husni cautions, the stakes have been raised dramatically. To win the hearts and minds — and ! pocketbooks — of readers in a bursting marketplace, and with everyone's time at a premium, you've got to be really, really good.
The Week, an idiosyncratic success in the newsweekly field with its smartly selected smorgasbord of material from all over, succeeds by offering tasty "nuggets," he says. But it's important, Husni adds, to stop thinking of Time and Newsweek as traditional newsmagazines. If they are to flourish, they have to feature ambitious, highly engaging, elegantly written content.
"They have to become monthlies that come out on a weekly basis," he says. "They have to put out Esquire on a weekly basis."
Time, he says, set the standard for such high-quality fare with Steven Brill's 26,000-word treatise on the nation's medical care system last year.
The need to be truly excellent is a particular burden for the reborn Newsweek, whose cover price is a pricey $7.99. Husni has already shelled out $150 to get access to the venerable title on all platforms. "If I give you $150," he says, "you better give me more than Lady Gaga."
But that newsstand price, and Newsweek's overall business strategy, may doom the print rebirth, says Ken Doctor, a leading media analyst.
Newsweek redux in print could work, Doctor says, but "it's a long shot, and at $8 it's even more of a long shot." He adds, "That pricing is awfully high for the revival of a ghost publication."
Doctor has long been a proponent of the once-anathema but now widely accepted notion that news outlets should charge for digital content. But Newsweek may be taking this approach a couple of steps too far.
Most news outlets are trying to survive and thrive with a mix of revenue streams: subscribers, advertisers, events, marketing services, whatever. But Newsweek is aiming to get 80% or more of its money from paying customers.
"That's much too heavily reliant on readers," Doctor says. "They need balance, other revenue sources. And the magazine is overpriced. The business model is flawed."
!Then t! here's the question of its opening foray, the cover story which purported to identify the shadow figure who invented the trendy but trouble-plagued digital currency Bitcoin. No sooner had the story surfaced than the alleged inventor said he wasn't the guy. Many critics felt the piece was heavily circumstantial and took a more definitive tone than was warranted. The question looms: Did Newsweek, in an attempt to make a splashy debut, move too quickly?
If it turns out that the story was wrong, the damage to its credibility could profoundly harm Newsweek's chances of pulling off a successful comeback.
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