The last print issue of Newsweek has disappeared into bird cages everywhere, and the overriding meme in the media was one of the rise of digital and the death of print.
Newsweek’s last print cover.
As a longtime recipient of a Newsweek gift subscription, I’d like to point out that Newsweek died years before the Daily Beast takeover — when it became a terrible, terrible magazine.
Over the last few years I read it more out of amusement than interest, and suspect what readership remained were little more than victims of inertia.
After it “merged” with the Daily Beast it was transformed from irrelevant and inarticulate to largely absurd and provocative, and not in any way I’d define as “good.”
Some of the media stories alluded to the magazine’s failure on an editorial level, but most ignored it in favor of a racier storyline.
We’ll see what becomes of the online version, but in truth, I’m happy it won’t clutter my mailbox again (maybe I’ll get a gift subscription to The Economist). The death of print magazines? Well, more the death of poor-quality print magazines.
Keep writing, Tom Chandler.
I took one look at that cover and said, “What’s black and white and dead all over?”
Truthfully though, I’m growing more skeptical of the “death” of print by the minute, even with the fall of a fairly major publication. (As you point out, Newsweek may have had other problems that helped prompt it to go digital.)
There’s no doubt that digital will dominate one day (if it isn’t already). But death is harsh. Will it be true death, like digital cameras replacing film? Quasi-death, like cars replacing horses, where horse are still around because people enjoy them? Or just a flesh-wound death, like the computer replacing paper? (Yes, we used paper for a lot more things in the 70s like bank ledgers and library stacks, but paper is hardly dead today…)
When The New York Times stops the presses, that will be the death of print journalism, at least in the western world. And when there are no longer books, newspapers, magazines, company brochures, flyers on the windshield, Superbowl tickets, labels on paint cans, and Ikea instructions on a folded piece of foolscap, that will be the death of print.
Until then, I’m going to presume that the media landscape is simply re-prioritizing.
~Graham
Graham Strong(Quote) (Reply)
I think it’s been dead for years.
Interesting points about the “death” of print. I tend to view death in binary terms (when I’m gone, I’m gone — at least lacking the technology to back up my brain), but there are levels. And naturally, newsweeklies and newspapers are pretty clearly the most vulnerable to digital given the timescale they exist in.
TC(Quote) (Reply)