Newsweek burned itself out in a mad quest for clicks

[Johan Larson]

Slate has an interesting (and long) article about various problems at Newsweek. Basically, after a company called IBT bought the venerable weekly newsmagazine and took it online, Newsweek enjoyed a year-long renaissance with ample funding to do good journalism. Then a financial crunch hit, and the company became all about making as much money though online ads as possible, by any means whatsoever.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/what-went-wrong-at-newsweek-according-to-current-and-former-staffers.html

[Johnny1A]

It's interesting, but Newsweek's problems go back further than the story implies.  In many ways, the more interesting question is how Newsweek ended up in that vulnerable state to start with.

In fairness, part of it is technological change beyond the control of the industry.  The advent of on-line publishing, and the emerging oligopoly power of outfits like Facebook and Google have put tremendous pressure on the publishing industry, in multiple ways. 

But it's also cultural.  American news coverage used to divided between daily papers, the TV news on the Big Three networks, marginal stuff like PBS, and the weeklies, of which the big three were Time, U.S. News and World Report, and of course Newsweek.

It's no great secret that the news media in the USA lean left, they have for many decades.  But the problem ran far deeper, and one the emergence of competitive sources like talk radio and then the Internet enabled people to realize the depth of it.  For example, at the height of the Bill Clinton scandals and the ongoing impeachment, the big three newsweeklies hardly talked about it, after the first few weeks.  It became a secondary story, played down and 'spun' as far as they dared to favor Clinton.

Likewise things like environmental issues, or national security, or immigration, almost invariably the newsweeklies would make themselves the voice of the liberal left, while pretending to be 'objective' and 'neutral'.  As more and more new sources and channels emerged, it became impossible to hide this because the other sources would reveal what was being left out of the story, or do comparisons between what the magazine printed this week and what it printed 3 or 4 years ago, or simply letting competing voices get out.

As late as 2004, for example, a scandal broke out regarding Democratic Presidential candidate at that time, John Kerry, and a group of Vietnam veterans who called themselves the Swiftvets.  Kerry was running using his Vietnam experience as a 'cover', or justification, to try and offset the Democratic Party's reputation of military weakness.  The trouble was that Kerry had a track record of doubletalk and sleazy evasion on the subject.  The Swiftvets accused Kerry of falsifying his wartime heroics, just as Kerry was revving up to run.

Now, the interesting thing about this, regarding the news weeklies, is not whether the allegations were true of false.  Instead of reporting on the Swiftvet allegations, and trying to sort out what was true or false, essentially all the major daily newspapers, the TV networks, CNN, and all 3 big news magazines proceeded to ignore the story.  They didn't try to rebut it, they pretended it wasn't happening.  You could read the papers, watch most TV (other than FOX), or yes, read Newsweek, and you'd have no idea the scandal was even happening.  This went on for, IIRC, about 8 days.

At the end of the 8 days, the whole country was talking about the story they were ignoring.

At one time, such a news blackout would have been effective.  But by 2004, the story just went out past them, on talk radio, on the Internet, on FOX news, and not only did they fail to bury the story, but anybody paying attention could see that they had tried to bury it.  Their silence became loud.

The end result of decades of this sort of thing was that the supporting audience of the big newsweeklies became even more limited to liberals, and in turn they were ever more dependent on that limited audience.  Newsweek was particularly affected, and this led them into the position where they were entrapped and could be infamously 'purchased for a dollar', and later to be purchased as a name by IBT.

Evidence that alternative possibilities did exist is provided by The Economist, which is also heavily biased, but manages to do enough interesting stuff, aimed at a broad enough audience, that it remains profitable and can command high subscription prices and advertising revenue even yet.  (Though they are slipping, some of their American political coverage is starting to become almost fawningly liberal, in a way that reminds of Newsweek and its sister publications before their fall.  Someone is leadind The Economist down a dangerous path.)