Legal Commentary

Friday Night Open Thread

By Jeralyn

The expected merger of Newsweek and The Daily Beast was confirmed today. Newsweek online will no longer exist, but be folded into the Daily Beast. Here's how it will work. Tina Brown will be Editor in Chief of both, and the new name is the Newsweek Daily Beast Co. Tina has more here. Howard Kurtz adds this comment from Tina in his column, which I think is absolutely right. Reading a weekly magazine for news is obsolete:

The effort to keep on persisting with something called a newsmagazine is probably outdated at this point,” Brown says. “Magazines are great venues for predictive and reconstructive journalism, for cultural journalism, for narrative journalism, for profile journalism. All these things can be done online, but do work better with the rhythms of print.”

With Newsweek's print edition to morph into something other than news, it leaves Time Magazine as the sole survivor in the newsweekly print market, since U.S. News & World Report also announced recently it would cease print publication and just publish digitally.

Why do weekly magazines like People still thrive? Is it the photos? Is it that readers don't follow celebrities on a daily basis the way they follow the news, so enough of the material is still news to them a week later? And does anyone subscribe to either, or just pick them up in airports and at the hair salon or doctor's office?

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on November 12, 2010 (boomark / email).