The battle may come down to Time versus the Economist, but in any event, the shift to viewsweeklies is already well underway.
Not long ago, three truly mass-market newsmagazines came out every week to tell Americans about world and national events, and it was a hugely lucrative business. Media empires were built on the idea.
But with readers and ads melting away, and more media outlets available to get the same information faster, U.S. News & World Report took itself out of that competition in 2008, and Newsweek may be poised to step back from it this year, leaving Time as the one playing something closest to the traditional newsweekly game, and making money at it.
But in fact, the entire category, Time included, has already transformed itself. The business of telling people what happened in the last week is just about gone, in favor of telling them how to think about the news — much like a rising competitor, The Economist — and the magazines resemble one another less, each having chosen a distinct direction.
People have asked for a generation whether newsweeklies would survive — but that is a more pressing question than ever, as the recession pummels the magazine industry. Magazine advertising pages fell 11.7 percent in 2008, and the categories that newsmagazines relied on most heavily — cars, pharmaceuticals and financial services — posted much steeper declines. Industry analysts predict that 2009 will be worse.
But for now, the answer may be that newsweeklies are already gone, having evolved into something else.
“We’re not in the business of telling people the news,” said Richard Stengel, managing editor of Time, a product of Time Warner’s Time Inc. division. “News has become a commodity. They already know the news.” ...
Time and Newsweek have definitely become more about views,” said Victor Navasky, a journalism professor at Columbia University, and a former publisher and editor of The Nation. And as a strategy, he said, “I think that makes sense.”
“I don’t see the audience going down, so the question is how much of it will continue to be on paper versus online,” he added. “And no one can say yet.”