The New Newsweek: A Good Read

Having spent most of my career in print journalism I've cringed as I've watched the laughable attempts of the behemoth print media companies to "monetize" the Web and to address their periodicals' declining lack of relevancy in the print age.

As recently as two years ago I received three newspapers at my front door every morning. Now the only time I enjoy the tactile, ink-smudged experience of a newspaper is when I'm hanging out at the St. Louis Bread Company with time to kill.

I do miss The New York Times Magazine, with its 5,000-word cover stories that exhaustively examine their subject and the NYTM's thoughtful, esoteric mix of essays, articles and photography. The magazines that I still receive – other than the pile of B2B mags that are all over the map – tend to be "good reads" with great graphics. Two that come immediately to mind are Outside and Gun & Garden, an amazingly thoughtful, gracefully-written and edited, well-designed Southern magazine.

Then there's Newsweek. I used to read my ex-wife's copy when she was done with it. Then I became a subscriber. Kludgy, predictable, it somehow filled a void that newspapers missed, and even the Internet didn't totally supplant it.

But I struggled a couple of weeks ago in deciding to renew my subscription. And now I'm glad I did. The new Newsweek is everything a magazine should be. Primarily, it's a good read. It has abandoned trying to dish up the byte-sized pieces of information that the Web does better in favor of in-depth exploration of a truly eclectic mix of issues.

The first issue under the new format included an interview with Obama on his internal driving forces, an exploration of the personalities behind the fall of Lehman, and an examination of the debate around treatment of autism. It also included a piece that would have seemed more at home in Wired, an exploration of Kurt Kurzweil, the inventor of the synthesizer who has reinvented himself as a futurist exposing eternal life through robotics.

The graphics are what really floored me. Newsweek has gone to better paper stock and and open, retro layout that mixes Esquire or New York magazine from the '70s with Good magazine. The Kurzweil article has a chart of his hits and misses as a futurist. There's a chart that does a great job of putting in perspective the size of the stimulus by couching it in terms of a shopping list that includes such items as $146 billion to buy an electric car for every 16- and 17-year-old in America and a $65 billion bailout for all of Bernie Madoff's victims.

The editorial and design makeover is the visible side of a complete makeover in Newsweek's business model.

“Mass for us is a business that doesn’t work,” said Tom Ascheim, Newsweek’s chief executive. “Wish it did, but it doesn’t. We did it for a long time, successfully, but we can’t anymore.”

Thirteen months ago, Newsweek lowered its rate base, the circulation promised to advertisers, to 2.6 million from 3.1 million, and Ascheim said that would drop to 1.9 million in July, and to 1.5 million next January.

He says the magazine has a core of 1.2 million subscribers who are its best-educated, most avid consumers of news, and who have higher incomes than the average reader.

“We would like to build our business around these people and grow that group slightly,” he said. “These are our best customers. They are our best renewers, and they pay the most.”