Newsweek to cease publication

steingar

steingar

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The venerable news and affairs magazine will cease publication after 80 years, becoming an on-line only magazine. Sign of the times, I guess. Link.
 
yea. Not sure if it's sad or not.

If you like tradition, I guess it's sad. If the company will still provide news, and make a profit, then it's just a new format.

Like when they went from black and white, to color. Just changing the medium that there readers will use to consume information.
 
I'm surprised that there are any publications left. When you think about it, it really is an inefficient method of distributing information, given the alternatives.


  • Chop down trees
  • Make paper
  • Print many copies of same information on that paper
  • Have someone personally deliver that paper to someone's address
  • Customer reads information
  • Customer puts paper out with trash (hopefully in the recycling bin)
  • Have someone come pick up the paper
  • Chop paper into little bits and hope to find a use for the paper/ink mixture
 
to become yet another sound of the cacaphony of online pundits doing "analysis" on news and political issues.

These days, Newsweek offers nothing unique. Might as well become part of Huffington Post.
 
I started subscribing to Newsweek when I was in 7th grade when it provided important material for a social studies class. It was great back then. Maybe 7-8 years ago I realized that all the articles had become the same week after week so I dropped it and never looked back.
 
Steve Foley said:
I'm surprised that there are any publications left. When you think about it, it really is an inefficient method of distributing information, given the alternatives.


  • Chop down trees
  • Make paper
  • Print many copies of same information on that paper
  • Have someone personally deliver that paper to someone's address
  • Customer reads information
  • Customer puts paper out with trash (hopefully in the recycling bin)
  • Have someone come pick up the paper
  • Chop paper into little bits and hope to find a use for the paper/ink mixture
Click to expand...

But specifically for the printed news magazine, the medium is simply too slow in the Internet age. By the time it hits the mailbox the material is dated and somewhat irrelevant. That has always been true for the weeklies and monthlies but the public expectation has changed.

My favorite newspaper for years was the Christian Science Monitor. I mourned the loss of the daily in print and the digital presence just doesn't do it for me the same way though it isn't bad - it just isn't good. Haven't tried the weekly but see paragraph above.

The only online news source that I really enjoy today is The Economist.

Everything else I read is the chaos of the online buffet provided by the aggregators.
 
Steve Foley said:
I'm surprised that there are any publications left. When you think about it, it really is an inefficient method of distributing information, given the alternatives.


  • Chop down trees
  • Make paper
  • Print many copies of same information on that paper
  • Have someone personally deliver that paper to someone's address
  • Customer reads information
  • Customer puts paper out with trash (hopefully in the recycling bin)
  • Have someone come pick up the paper
  • Chop paper into little bits and hope to find a use for the paper/ink mixture
Click to expand...

You got to have something to read, when they close the cabin door and before they get to cruise. I can't turn on my Kindle or my iPad or my iPhone....:confused:
 
Mafoo said:
For me, if I want the most unbiased and accurate US news, I go here:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world/us_and_canada/
Click to expand...

This is pretty funny. BBC's crazy bias and agenda-driven propaganda that pretends to be reporting are rather obvious to anyone who's not already in the tank. They simply hate America and all it stands for. They hate Russia, too. This sometimes leads to great amusement, as was in the case of 8/8/8 war. At the outbreak of hostilities, the BBC machine could not decide who they hate more, Ameirca or Russia, so they could not form their coverage (Georgia was supposed to be an American puppet). The result was acute paralisis and silence, while every other news outlet covered the events.
 
zaitcev said:
This is pretty funny. BBC's crazy bias and agenda-driven propaganda that pretends to be reporting are rather obvious to anyone who's not already in the tank. They simply hate America and all it stands for. They hate Russia, too. This sometimes leads to great amusement, as was in the case of 8/8/8 war. At the outbreak of hostilities, the BBC machine could not decide who they hate more, Ameirca or Russia, so they could not form their coverage (Georgia was supposed to be an American puppet). The result was acute paralisis and silence, while every other news outlet covered the events.
Click to expand...

Compared to any Murdoch owned outlet , MSNBC, what CNN has become etc. I'd prefer the BBC.

All the traditional big US outlets have become newstainment. Leaving one to cherrypick some national newspapers, and overseas.
 
That means that the copies on the table in the dentist office will be frozen in time to December, 2012. Now, they're only three or four months out of date...
 
Steve Foley said:
I'm surprised that there are any publications left. When you think about it, it really is an inefficient method of distributing information, given the alternatives.


  • Chop down trees
  • Make paper
  • Print many copies of same information on that paper
  • Have someone personally deliver that paper to someone's address
  • Customer reads information
  • Customer puts paper out with trash (hopefully in the recycling bin)
  • Have someone come pick up the paper
  • Chop paper into little bits and hope to find a use for the paper/ink mixture
Click to expand...

Write up that same list for a webserver farm. Starts with coal, natural gas, or nooooculear mining.

Data centers are excellent heat sources. And that's just the electricity for the server. Add the electricity for the infrastructure and the user devices. Now add manufacturing.

Trees actually may win out as more efficient and sustainable if you really do the math and the list.
 
As soon as I figured out I could take my iPad to the bathroom.... My use for magazines went to zero.
 
denverpilot said:
Write up that same list for a webserver farm. Starts with coal, natural gas, or nooooculear mining.

Data centers are excellent heat sources. And that's just the electricity for the server. Add the electricity for the infrastructure and the user devices. Now add manufacturing.

Trees actually may win out as more efficient and sustainable if you really do the math and the list.
Click to expand...

If I'm not mistaken, Google's servers alone take as much power as the Hoover Dam produces. And that's just the servers....
 
Does Newsweek still exists? I had no idea.
Next you're gonna try and convince me TIME is still around.
 
Not surprised. Haven't read it or Time in many years. Bill is correct. Might as well be Huffpo.
 
Scott Adams (you know, the Dilbert creator) has a political article up on his blog (as of yesterday) and did a very interesting thing... he tracked all of the "modern media" websites that wrote articles about his article and changed or removed the context of his article.

Whether someone agrees with Mr. Adams personal political views or not, it wasn't much of a surprise that he was up to six major "news" outlets who had twisted his words into things he didn't say and then created "headlines" to match.

I found the list more interesting than his blog post, actually. Specifics and very clear about what the "news" organizations purposefully trashed while "reporting" on his article.

Ethical journalism has been dead for a long while now, and the organizations that used to at least make a half-assed attempt at it, don't anymore.

Most of the out-of-context articles didn't even provide a link back to the original (it is the web after all), you had to go find it yourself if you got all your "news" from them.
 
denverpilot said:
Scott Adams (you know, the Dilbert creator) has a political article up on his blog (as of yesterday) and did a very interesting thing... he tracked all of the "modern media" websites that wrote articles about his article and changed or removed the context of his article.

Whether someone agrees with Mr. Adams personal political views or not, it wasn't much of a surprise that he was up to six major "news" outlets who had twisted his words into things he didn't say and then created "headlines" to match.

I found the list more interesting than his blog post, actually. Specifics and very clear about what the "news" organizations purposefully trashed while "reporting" on his article.

Ethical journalism has been dead for a long while now, and the organizations that used to at least make a half-assed attempt at it, don't anymore.

Most of the out-of-context articles didn't even provide a link back to the original (it is the web after all), you had to go find it yourself if you got all your "news" from them.
Click to expand...

Journalism is dead. The industry is populated by Zombies these days.
 
I was a subscriber to the print edition for nearly 20 years. I dropped it a year ago. It had become irrelevant. Given the viciousness with which they attacked me for not renewing, you'd think I alone was responsible for their demise. Good riddance...
 
We subscribed to Newsweek, more or less continually, from the 1960s until they did the attack-piece on Sarah Palin, circa 2008.

Canceled that day, never looked back.

Sent from my Nexus 7
 
Jay Honeck said:
We subscribed to Newsweek, more or less continually, from the 1960s until they did the attack-piece on Sarah Palin, circa 2008.

Canceled that day, never looked back.

Sent from my Nexus 7
Click to expand...

We canceled when they did the attack piece on Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Our family all passed around Time, Newsweek and Life, for decades but Time and Newsweek earned our contempt and Life went out of business.
 
Florida Cracker said:
We canceled when they did the attack piece on Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Our family all passed around Time, Newsweek and Life, for decades but Time and Newsweek earned our contempt and Life went out of business.
Click to expand...

Which piece from 1980 do you consider to be the attack piece?
 
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