'Newsweek' to resume printing next year
Newsweek's last print issue, published on Dec. 31, 2012.(Photo: Elizabeth Weise)
Story Highlights
- The magazine stopped printing at the end of 2012 after 80 years
- New editor wants to dedicate print space to stories, not for grazing "short, little" items
- Business model calls for relying mostly on subscription revenue, not ad sales
Newsweek's new owner wants to resume printing the magazine.
IBT Media, a New York-based media company that bought the Newsweek brand in August, plans to revive the magazine early next year, following its 'last" issue that was published at the end of 2012.
IBT plans to generate most of its Newsweek-related revenue from subscription. "We're not going to shoo away advertisers. But we're not going to sell (the magazine) for less than the cost of producing it," says Jim Impoco, the magazine's editor-in-chief.
In 2010, the late billionaire stereo magnate Sidney Harman bought the iconic but financially troubled news magazine from the Washington Post Company by assuming its debt and paying $1 in cash. He then formed a joint venture with IAC/InterActive to merge the magazine with IAC's Daily Beast news website. IAC, controlled by billionaire media mogul Barry Diller, eventually assumed a controlling stake and shut down the print operation. Failing to turn Newsweek into a profitable venture, IAC sold it to IBT for an undisclosed sum after several months of searching for a buyer.
IBT relaunched Newsweek.com in October and has hired "a couple dozen staffers" who have been writing for the website, says Impoco, who previously worked at Thomson Reuters as enterprise editor and executive editor for Thomson Reuters Digital.
With the new print magazine, Impoco plans to move away from the recent-news-recap editorial approach common among newsweeklies and mostly publish originally reported stories. As an example, he cites a Newsweek.com story, published Tuesday, about investors' pessimistic outlook for a contractor that worked on the Healthcare.gov website.
The magazine's print space will be reserved for articles. "The short, little things" that commonly appear in weekly magazines - info-graphics, lists, charts, brief news summaries - will not appear in the new Newsweek, Impoco says. "They are labor intensive," he says. "They're from the 90s. Those days are over."