Newsweek to go out of existence as a print publication

Ed H. writes:

Two junk-leftist rags Newsweek and The Guardian can’t sell enough copies to make a profit. Newsweek is at least 50 percent advertising, and still it is losing money. Newsweek has announced it is going digital, and The Guardian is seriously discussing going digital. Meaning that they will have no more of a presence to the public than VFR. No more copies on sale at news stands. In the field paid reporters will be replaced by instantaneous world input from Twitter and cell phone cameras. Journalistic “scoops” will be rendered pointless as anything that appears in one corner of the Web will be everywhere in minutes.

From the story on The Guardian:

Earlier this year, Adam Freeman, the Guardian’s outgoing commercial chief, admitted that the Guardian is on a “mission” to be able to stand alone as a digital-only publication, and was mixing its stable of traditional journalists with enthusiastic citizens who would work for free.

LA replies:

I grew up reading Newsweek. My parents subscribed to it, not Time. I realized, I think in the early 1990s, that both publications were not just liberal but evil, deliberately disseminating a nihilistic sense of existence under the cover of being responsible “newsmagazines,” and never read them again, except for an occasional article on the Web.

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Terry Morris writes:

This is outrageous! Why doesn’t the government declare Newsweek to be
“too big too fail,” or better still, “too important to fail?”

Philip M. writes from England:

Terry Morris writes:

This is outrageous! Why doesn’t the government declare Newsweek to be “too big too fail,” or better still, “too important to fail?”

In the case of the Guardian, this is already not so far from the truth, in that it relies on government money to exist. A great deal of the advertising revenue that has kept the Guardian afloat has come from the fact that they have a voluminous weekly jobs section in their newspaper, in which posts in the public sector, voluntary sector (which these days is basically state-owned) and organisations such as the BBC (at least until recently) advertise situations vacant exclusively in the Guardian, giving them a source of revenue and a readership not available to other newspapers.

Yet in spite of this advantage, they could still not turn a profit. And yet in spite of the indifference to their views that this would suggest, they are still the newspaper that sets the agenda in most ‘civilised’ discussion at places like the BBC, where I understand that, again until recently, most journalists and other members of staff would order and read only the Guardian. This tells you everything you need to know about the tiny sliver of the British public—London, Oxbridge, middle class, liberal—whose views are represented in British public life.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 18, 2012 10:22 AM | Send