A Note on Newsweek

James Fallows
The Atlantic
May 5 2010

One thing I learned during my stint as a weekly news magazine editor* was how deceptively difficult this kind of journalism has become. Story selection? For a daily newspaper, it's easier. If there is a big airplane crash on Monday, you write about it on Tuesday. It's easier for a monthly magazine like the Atlantic, too. We're simply not going to write about the airplane crash at all unless we have some special angle to talk about, three months later. But for a weekly? If you cover the crash in your next issue, you're largely giving readers info they already know. If you don't, you're "off the news." So unless you have some hot reportorial scoop, you often end up splitting the difference -- having a little base-touching mention of the disaster, which inevitably gets squeezed for space until it's reduced to familiar newsmag-ese haiku, while meanwhile trying to figure out what people will find interesting to read on top of everything else flowing at them all the time. [*US News, 1996-1998.]

When these magazines were started three full generations ago -- human generations that is; more like a hundred technology generations -- the task was obviously easier. The Henry Luce/ Briton Hadden vision behind Time in the 1920s was to give people across the continent a weekly summary of news they couldn't get otherwise. The past half century of news magazine existence has involved constant rejiggering of the formula to reflect the fact that first radio, then broadcast TV, then 24/7 cable TV, then national distribution of the NYT and WSJ, then the Internet have steadily cut away material and audience from the weeklies, endlessly forcing them onto new terrain. This, for instance, is why US News came up first with "News You Can Use" and then with its lamentable "Best College" rankings. What originally had kept the weeklies going, readers could get someplace else.

This is not the time for a whole "economics of the press" discourse. Actually, I have what I think is a new approach on that theme coming out soon in the magazine. (Subscribe!) But here is a basic facts-of-life primer on Newsweek's predicament: Why is the magazine in such extreme economic trouble, if its recent redesign was in many ways more "provocative" and "thoughtful" and "interesting"?

The answer, in my view, has to do with the "scale laws" of magazine publishing. At least for print subscriptions, there appears to be a natural limit to the audience for different kinds of magazines. Let's think of these in big, order-of-magnitude blocks. All figures here are approximate but true to the general pattern.

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