Old news and the new 24/7
The current plan to revive Newsweek plan is silly: reliance on a better look for the magazine, and offering discounts to subscribers who want to buy books. (Last I checked, Amazon.com offered major discounts on books — without having to subscribe to Newsweek. And they offered them as digital downloads, too.)
That’s essentially a 1907 model.
Newsweek’s only hope — after the new owner loses his pants, having already lost his shirt on it — is to make it immediate and interactive. NewsWEEK, aping Time, was intended to encapsulate all the news in a timely fashion for busy people. People too busy to read 2-3 newspapers a day, as was the norm at the time. That was 1933. Today, no one would wait a week to find out anything; that’s why the magazine’s best hope is in realizing that the news and information cycle is now 24/7 — 24 seconds, every 7 minutes — and that much of the news comes from individual users, not from press poobahs sitting on high.
