Patterico's Pontifications

10/18/2012

NEWSWEEK to Kill Print Edition

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:55 am



By the end of the year:

Newsweek will print its final edition at the end of this year.

After nearly 80 years of publication, the news magazine will shift to a digital-only format, available online and on tablet computers, Editor in Chief Tina Brown said on the magazine’s website Thursday morning. Its last printed edition will be the Dec. 31 issue.

“We are transitioning Newsweek, not saying goodbye to it,” Brown said. “We remain committed to Newsweek and to the journalism that it represents. This decision is not about the quality of the brand or the journalism — that is as powerful as ever. It is about the challenging economics of print publishing and distribution.”

The brand is worth so much, NEWSWEEK was sold a while back for $1.

I, for one, will miss seeing this kind of thing at the checkout stand:

41 Responses to “NEWSWEEK to Kill Print Edition”

  1. Newsweek didn’t kill the print edition. Those of us who used to subscribe did that. Credit where credit is due please.

    Joe Miller (00407a)

  2. Ha! Haaaaa!

    Nelson (2103c8)

  3. I think those who care about the news aren’t getting their news from checkout stands, with stories that are weeks old. That’s not news. It’s even worse when those who are informed realize that Newsweek is hacktastic.

    Dustin (73fead)

  4. ____________________________________________

    Even before the digital age, Newsweek always seemed redundant and like an afterthought, caught in the shadow of Time magazine. Originally, I give it credit for at least running columns by writers like George Will. But then it went blatantly into the leftwing tank, and so its demise seems fitting in this age of “goddamn America.”

    Mark (ece7bc)

  5. Al Guardian is talking sam ting.

    gary gulrud (dd7d4e)

  6. Newsweek might as well kill the print edition. They already killed the notion of objective journalism.

    JVW (f5695c)

  7. But, by the same token, I can’t help but feel sorry for all the people in their printing and distribution departments who will be out of a job and dumped into the Obama Economy.

    JVW (f5695c)

  8. Good. Newsweek has not been something worth killing a tree for, for a long time now.

    nk (875f57)

  9. Headline suggestion for their first online-only edition:
    “We’re All Digital Formatists Now”

    Icy (a80d45)

  10. I can’t help but feel sorry for all the people in their printing and distribution departments who will be out of a job and dumped into the Obama Economy.

    Comment by JVW — 10/18/2012

    Me too. That sucks.

    Dustin (73fead)

  11. It was once said of the KKK that if it wasn’t for the FBI informers they wouldn’t be able to field a softball team. In the same vein, if it wasn’t for Doctors’ offices, Newsweek would have had a negative circulation years ago.

    C. S. P. Schofield (4feea2)

  12. R.I.P. Sylvia Kristel, forever “Emmanuelle”

    Icy (a80d45)

  13. Doctors’ offices severely hit.

    Kiliman (87b402)

  14. But…but…what will Eleanor Rodham Clift do?

    AD-Restore the Republic/Obama Sucks! (b8ab92)

  15. So what happens to those people who have a print subscription? I wonder what the actual PAID subscriber base is and what the ad rates are? I have a gratis subscription running through October 2013.
    Most recent copy has a cover story on Abe Lincoln The Great Campaigner..How Lincoln traded favors, twisted arms, and bullied friends to win the good fight. And inside a large photo of Choom with a goofy expression on his face looking at a portrait of Lincoln. “The White House has rarely been occupied by a more devoted admirer of Lincoln than Barack Obama.” This rag generally makes an effort to bash Romney in various ways. To wit: David Stockman rips romeny on jobs and the bain drain. Or can Todd Akin surprise his critics. I’m surprised Urkel doesn’t have a bailout plan ready for the various rags that support him slavishly.

    Calypso Louis Farrakhan (e799d8)

  16. The $1 media empire brand is indeed about as powerful as ever, give or take a dollar or two.

    Dustin (73fead)

  17. Newsweek and TIME were both left wing since about 1973, but Newsweek was sometimes malicious, protecting wrongdoing, protecting Clinton very cleverly, and for that reason worth reading.

    It would sometimes appear (to most of its readers anyway) to break stories, but actually it was repeating something that had been published somewhere else, but doing so in a way more favorable to Clinton. Of course this way it also became a good index and tip sheet. (Here is something to research)

    If it ever appeared to have unique information that was detrimental to Clinton, it wasn’t really the only place, even though it had a much bigger circulation than whatever source it was trying to take the glory and attention away from. They wanted people to feel they were getting complete information from them, and for many people it might be the first place they heard of something.

    TIME had bias, but Newsweek knew what it was doing.

    This tilt and worse seems to have persisted for a long time, even through change in ownership.

    (I had the idea for some time that somebody’s been trying to kill Newsweek, in hopes that the archives will become unavailable. That’s probably a little bit too difficult to do these days. If somebody tried too hard, people would notice)

    Sammy Finkelman (dfe091)

  18. I read some time ago in a newspaper that Newsweek was going to stop publication, but this is the first real confirmation of it.

    My subscription expired on 15 Oct 2015. I used an opportunity supplied by a telephone call to extend it another year recently, so it expires on 29 Oct 2016. (Unlike Smart Money, they kept on accepting new subscriptions till very late)

    This is my policy with all magazines (that I like) that I have subscriptions to.

    I knew that what they would replace it with probably an online subscription to a magazine website and database and that was likely to be worth far more. They may try to substitute another magazine.

    Or, if like U.S. News and World Report they went monthly, it would be extended a very long time.

    Sammy Finkelman (08bb6f)

  19. Newspeak has been Leftist for a lot longer than that SF.
    In the Cro-Magnon Era (Late-50’s – Mid-60’s), Leftists read The New Republic, Liberals read Newsweek, Democrats read Time, Republicans read U.S.News & World Report, and Conservatives read National Review.

    AD-Restore the Republic/Obama Sucks! (b8ab92)

  20. I recall being in junior high when a friend called them ‘Slime’ and ‘Newspeak’.

    luagha (5cbe06)

  21. Good riddance.

    Now if only the same thing happened to all the other house organs of the Democratic Party.

    Alan (098693)

  22. Good riddance to the worst of rubbage.

    Beldar (1bf096)

  23. Admit it. On some level, we’re all going to miss seeing those “Is Your Baby Racist” covers in the supermarket check-out line, if only for that “gotta laugh so you don’t cry” feeling.

    Wesley M. (5859b4)

  24. Inevitable. And the first of likely many, many more to follow in that medium. Still, never a happy moment when a print pub shutters. Always useful for something. Coaster. Swatting flies and such. Try that w/your laptop or iPad.

    DCSCA (9d1bb3)

  25. Speaking of obsolescent and irrelevant, the International Man of Parody shows up.

    SPQR (768505)

  26. Icy… you’re killing me!

    Colonel Haiku (00b186)

  27. CSPAN carries a Springsteen set and Comedy Central hosts the President of the United States- all on the same day. No way a weekly print tomb like Newsweek could keep surviving, or thriving, in this mix of Brave New Media World even w/Tina’s touch. Life eventually couldn’t compete w/TV either. Time for Time to go as well. And the NYT, LAT…. it’s inevitable. As the cost and capacity of these tablets drop to the disposable pricepoint of cellphones, in 20 years or so they’ll be gone– or gone online.

    DCSCA (9d1bb3)

  28. The interesting question, if DCSCA’s prediction about other print outlets is true, is what happens to all the young journalism majors who have been trained to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted” and are planning to “invest” $100k of mom and dad’s money to get a master’s degree from Columbia or Yale or some such place? How in the world are they every going to make money to pay back their student loans? There are only so many (paid) White House press secretaries at any given time, and even Nancy Pelosi can’t hire all of them for her office (though she will no doubt try). Writing blog posts for Gawker at $75 per post — or writing them for the Huffington Post at $0 per post — isn’t going to pay the rent.

    JVW (f5695c)

  29. I couldn’t find that issue in my normal grocery stores in Deep Blue West LA. I wonder how many just got returned to the distributor.

    Kevin M (bf8ad7)

  30. And in even better news, if they think they’ll survive in digital-only format they’re whistling past the graveyard.

    Steve57 (c8ac21)

  31. Well it will be like the Flying Dutchmen, a phantom, the better reporters like Eli Lake will still survice,

    narciso (ee31f1)

  32. Comment by C. S. P. Schofield — 10/18/2012 @ 9:21 am

    It was once said of the KKK that if it wasn’t for the FBI informers they wouldn’t be able to field a softball team. In the same vein, if it wasn’t for Doctors’ offices, Newsweek would have had a negative circulation years ago

    I think they said something like that first about the Communist Party.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  33. 31. Well it will be like the Flying Dutchmen, a phantom, the better reporters like Eli Lake will still survice,

    Comment by narciso — 10/19/2012 @ 3:16 am

    Yes, but elsewhere. Mickey Kaus has pointed out there’s no way they can keep paying their better reporters and their higher paid columnists (note I didn’t say “better”) just off what their “Newsweek global” website will bring in.

    He thinks Newsweek will survive for a bit in a skeletal format to give The Daily Beast some claim to a historical legacy. Then fold.

    I believe he’s right.

    Steve57 (c8ac21)

  34. While Mr Farrakhan worried, “So what happens to those people who have a print subscription,” being only four people simply makes it a non-optimal bump in the road, one which can be fixed.

    But it does say something that The National Enquirer, The Star, People, Us, and their like can survive, while Newsweek cannot.

    The snarky Dana (3e4784)

  35. Newsweek has bitten the dust;
    And soon Time will go bust,
    It might not be fair,
    But I really don’t care,
    Lib reporting we cannot trust.

    The Limerick Avenger (3e4784)

  36. Newsweek seems to have two different versions of the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi:

    He hear the story of Diplomatic Security special agent David Ubben, present at the scene of the crime, and alleged details of what happened.

    He’s the one whose father spoke to the press, but he didn’t, and his father said his son didnd’t tell too any details about the attack. I didn’t remember the name and didn’t know he was supposed to be Christopher Steven’s bodyguard.

    He was badly wounded, and almost killed (in the second attack)

    Version A: Behind Ubben, in a specially fortified suite called a safe haven, the ambassador and another diplomat, Sean Smith, should be well protected. There is a large closet, similar to a “panic room,” with supplies of water and food to withstand a siege of hours or even days..

    But it can’t withstand a fire!! Did the attackers know? Did the attackers know he would go there?

    and Ubben has radioed the four other American security men holed up in other consulate buildings that he and the ambassador and Smith are OK. This is what the safe haven and the safe room have been built for. And he is there with his M-4 at the ready. He will make sure nobody gets through the steel grilles that protect them.

    What does he actually do? He hides himself, never fires his M-4 rifle, and lets the attrackers turn it into a death trap. Was he even there, really??

    Or is this whole story not accurate, not what Ubben actually says?

    It doesn’t make too much sense this way:

    Ubben sees some of the attackers coming into the other, open side of the villa. They are carrying jerrycans full of diesel used to fuel the embassy’s electrical generators. They peer through the locked grate of the safe haven. They rattle it. They don’t seem to see him.

    Maybe he wasn’t there. Or he was hiding. Or he had no idea the ambassador was in the building. Or this whole story is inaccurate. And the radio report was earlier.

    Of course one rifle isn’t good against a bunch of AK-47s.

    Ubben watches. He waits. They are spreading diesel over the floor, pouring it onto the overstuffed Arab-style furniture. The fire begins. The flames start to spread. The fumes—the fumes are everywhere. And there is nothing Ubben can do to stop them.

    The flames, or the men, or both?

    Later, in the very same Daily Beast story:

    Version B. The toxic smoke was so thick in the main villa that Ubben, the ambassador, and Smith could barely see. They tried to take refuge in a small bathroom with a window, but there wasn’t enough air. Ubben, barely able to breathe or speak, opened a bedroom window and rolled out onto a little patio protected by sandbags. Tracer bullets whizzed through the air nearby, and every so often he heard deafening explosions. Ubben, an Iraq War veteran, thought he was under fire, but at that point that was not his first concern. The ambassador and Smith hadn’t followed him out. Ubben went back, but he couldn’t find them. He radioed the other agents, half strangling as he talked. They joined the search through the clouds of smoke and toxic fumes. Finally, one found Smith and pulled him out, but he was already dead.

    Another thing wrong here is the building with the safe room that the ambassador went into is not the one he worked out of.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  37. From NBC:

    David Ubben is having a series of surgeries and his father expects him to be hospitalized for several months.

    Rex Ubben said his son did not share many details of the attack with him, but added: “He seems to have been blown up twice, and kept going after the first one. … I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to whoever did the first aid the first time, the second time, and maintained the tourniquets until they could get him out of there.” …

    …Ubben also questioned why it took so long for his son to reach a hospital after the attack, saying of his son’s condition, “by my count, there were five or six broken bones (one completely smashed, thus the operations) and shrapnel damage head to toe. I was surprised at how many parts of him were injured.”

    …Ubben said he was bothered that “people do not seem to realize that this was a much bigger disaster for the people of Libya than it was for us, that they were attacked just like we were.”

    http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/04/14215003-dad-of-us-bodyguard-blown-up-twice-in-benghazi-says-state-department-should-admit-mistakes?lite

    David Ubben, a 31-year-old State Department employee, suffered broken bones and other injuries in the Sept. 11 attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.

    Follow @NBCNewsWorld

    As David Ubben recuperates at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington, his father, Rex Ubben, said he did not blame the State Department or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for his son’s injuries.

    But he added, “I do find it troubling that they have not owned up to their shortcomings; in government, in the military, and in business, if something goes wrong, you admit it, correct it, and move on.”

    Also http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/en/newsdetails/news/world/US-may-have-overstated-security-of-Libyan-embassy-compound-20121001

    With as few as four armed Americans and three armed Libyans guarding the mission as the attack began, Stevens’s own bodyguard was so far away that he needed to sprint across the compound under gunfire to reach the building where the ambassador was working at the time. But the bodyguard ultimately left without Stevens, who died of smoke inhalation.

    The place where he was working, was not the same building where he went to. Not the building that had the safe room.

    And even after eight additional American security officers arrived from Tripoli, the roughly 30 Americans were surprised and outgunned again in the second attack, dependent on an ad hoc collection of Libyan militiamen to protect their retreat and avoid greater casualties, Libyan officials said.

    American counterterrorism officials and Libyans on the scene say the mortar attack was most likely carried out by the same group of assailants who had attacked the mission and then followed the convoy of American survivors retreating to what they thought was a safe house.

    This is a quite different “safe house” than the one on the “consulate” grounds.

    The first mortar shell fell short, but the next two hit their mark in rapid succession with deadly precision, according to an account that David Ubben, one of Mr. Stevens’s security guards, told his father, Rex Ubben, which was supported by other American and Libyan officials.

    “There are three villas inside and the walls are high, and the only house that got hit was the house we were in,” said Fathi el-Obeidi, a Libyan militia commander who came to help evacuate the Americans.

    This indicated that many of the assailants were practiced at aiming their mortars, skills they learned in fighting Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s army.

    Somebody had inside information.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  38. 36. According to Newsweek,

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/21/truth-behind-the-benghazi-attack.html

    David Ubben was outside – outside what? The locked room? But inside the building?

    deep in the dark inside the villa

    A villa is one house, but there were several.

    OK. He can’t prevent them for setting a fire.

    Ubben gets out, alone:

    The toxic smoke was so thick in the main villa that Ubben, the ambassador, and Smith could barely see. They tried to take refuge in a small bathroom with a window, but there wasn’t enough air. Ubben, barely able to breathe or speak, opened a bedroom window and rolled out onto a little patio protected by sandbags. Tracer bullets whizzed through the air nearby, and every so often he heard deafening explosions. Ubben, an Iraq War veteran, thought he was under fire, but at that point that was not his first concern. The ambassador and Smith hadn’t followed him out.

    Ubben went back, but he couldn’t find them. He radioed the other agents, half strangling as he talked. They joined the search through the clouds of smoke and toxic fumes.

    The firing has stopped? Q. When is this? Hours later?

    Finally, one found Smith and pulled him out, but he was already dead. They could not find the ambassador.

    In the White House, President Obama was meeting with National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to review the options, but the news they were getting from the fledgling government in Libya was crazily contradictory.

    The only thing for sure was that the Americans in the consulate were facing a concerted terrorist assault, and the local forces hadn’t been able to make a difference. A Libyan relief force of 40 made it to the consulate but were overwhelmed. A second couldn’t get there because roads were blocked by the attackers, and they came under sniper fire.

    In fact, the closest crack combat unit, described by State Department officials as a six-man “quick-reaction security team,” was only about a mile away at the CIA annex. But by the time it arrived accompanied by 16 Libyans, the consulate villa was burning and the ambassador seemed to have disappeared.

    The compound was still full of attackers, and the Libyans in the rescue team started to insist that “it’s time to leave. We’ve got to leave.”

    The five diplomatic-security agents crowded into an armored vehicle with Smith’s body, driving through a hail of bullets impacting the windows and explosives thrown under the tires. At last they made it to the CIA annex…..


    Hours passed. A handful of American reinforcements landed at Tripoli airport, and a group of about 30 Libyans drawn from different militias joined them. Some of those in the Libyan contingent who talked to Newsweek have given the only firsthand account so far of what happened at the CIA outpost in Benghazi. And while much of the assault on the consulate had been amateurish, depending on lax security, this attack had the mark of real professionals.

    “Before we even showed up, they were there waiting,” says a Libyan militia officer who calls himself Ibn Febrayir. At about 4 a.m., as Febrayir and his men prepared to evacuate the Americans from the CIA compound, the street was dead quiet. And then a shot rang out. Then within seconds there was a whooshing sound of rocket-propelled grenades being fired, raining down into the annex compound from attackers in positions concealed on rooftops and behind a stand of trees. In two minutes 15 RPGs hit. Then a pause. Then came the muffled sound of a mortar going off, and a devastating detonation as it hit the roof of one of the annex buildings. “It was a good shot,” says Febrayir. “Whoever fired it knew what they were doing.” It was dark. And they were too accurate. “They must have known the coordinates,” said Febrayir. He and his forces retreated down the road. Inside the annex, the high explosive rounds lobbed on top of the buildings killed two members of the quick-reaction team, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, who had taken up positions defending the compound. Special agent Ubben, who was barely able to move because of the smoke inhalation, also was hit by the blast but survived.

    The shooting at the annex went on for about 15 minutes, says one member of Febrayir’s team. And then it stopped as abruptly as it had started. The assailants simply disappeared.

    In Washington, President Obama ordered warships to sail toward the Libyan coast and Special Operations forces to be ready for action. At about 5.30 a.m., Febrayir got a call from a Tripoli official warning him that by 6 a.m. “a foreign force” would arrive and everyone near “the farm,” as the Libyans call the annex, would be treated as “hostile.” “You must get out,” the Tripoli official told him. But in the end a motley crowd of militias showed up to escort the survivors to the airport, and even Febrayir wasn’t sure he could trust them.

    Just one day after Obama’s speech in front of the Pentagon, he stood in the Rose Garden at the White House. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation,” he said. “We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.”

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  39. Good Allah, you are missing the point, that there are intercepts that the Feb 17th was told to stand down, by a prominent local politician, that Ansar Al Sharia, is a splinter of the former organization,

    narciso (ee31f1)

  40. I guess Sammy is lucky that Righthaven isn’t in business any longer.

    SPQR (768505)

  41. Comment by narciso — 10/22/2012 @ 1:54 pm

    Good Allah, you are missing the point, that there are intercepts that the Feb 17th was told to stand down, by a prominent local politician, that Ansar Al Sharia, is a splinter of the former organization.

    That’s Newsweek. I know there has to be something wrong with the story and that whatever they say has to subtly be part of a coverup..

    But I have not familiarized myself with who did what on Sept 11th.The New York Times had a few stories and I better find that. You have to re-read things after some more facts come out.

    What do you make of this article?

    http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/09/22/Security-Forces-At-Consulate-In-Benghazi-Had-Ties-to-Muslim-Brotherhood

    The leader it says is Fawzi Bukatef, who has ties both to the Moslem Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. One of his subordinates, Ismail al-Salabi, is an Islamist military leader in his own right. Bukatef says the February 17 Brigade handled everything. (Khattala told the NYT two other leaders of other militias were there and the NYT protects their names)

    Then Beritbart.com reminds us that Libyan Interior Minister Wanis al-Sharif’s (he of the multiple Latin alphabet spellings, and a man who also claimed there was a spontaneous attack and a demonstration against the video) claimed that Libyan security forces essentially handed the US consulate personnel over to the attackers.

    Breitbart seems to think he’s a credible source.

    Wait a second isn’t Wanis the man who says he ordered them to stand down?

    Now Newsweek reports some Libyan group rushed the Americans out of there, without the Ambassador.

    Also says Obama was getting contradictory information.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)


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