Is Newsweek out of Time?
Today’s WSJ takes a look at the future of Newsweek, which this week announced plans to shed roughly one-fifth of its staff. It’s not pretty. Toward the of the piece, the reporter describes a speech that Newsweek editor Jon Meacham (a good guy, a smart journalist, and an old friend) recently gave at Columbia University. Meacham “asked who reads Newsweek and none of the 100-odd students in attendance raised their hands.” Scary.
But perhaps scarier is that the dim response got me thinking about two of the most important questions in business.
1. If your product or service didn’t exist today, would somebody create it? Hmmm. If you had some capital, would you create a paper-based, physically-delivered general interest newsmagazine in 2008?
2. As Bill Taylor, Polly LaBarre, Jim Collins, and others have asked in various forms: If your business went away tomorrow, would anyone who doesn’t work there miss it? Suppose Newsweek shut its doors. Would readers launch a Jericho-style protest?
Dan,
I hope you are well and prospering. I am a Chicago resident (and Wildcat alum as you are) and I think I wouldn’t miss either the Sun-Times or Tribune if the publisher went bust, but I would certainly miss The Reader.
P.S. My Mother saw your Naperville Reads presentation and has already read JB. If you are in town June 4, please join me and friends for Pecha-Kucha Vol 5 at Martyrs.
Best,
Rob
Dear Dan:
On-target, again, as you tend to be.
It’s not just “Newsweek,” however, it’s the broader spectrum of print communications, including daily newspapers.
Every time I pick up the Boston Globe, or the Murdoch-realigned Wall Street Journal, I’m struck by the relative lack of “news” contrasted to “lifestyle” articles. It’s often hard to see where vapid “lifestyle” magazines end and daily newspapers begin.
If you were to subtract travel, lifestyle, and health features, the percentage of the typical newspaper devoted to news and editorial interpretation is disappointingly low.
In 8th Grade Social Studies each student had a subscription to Newsweek. We were quizzed on it each day and we learned more about the world and geography and politics just by reading that mag in a learning environment. Alas we also had music, art, and we were not forced to take “no child left behind” exams. I don’t know whether it is that younger folks do not partake in these mags because of the Internet available info, or perhaps they have never been exposed to it. A little of both is likely.
I was initiated to you by means of a reunning of your Holland, Michigan presentation on our local public access TV. Thank you for your work. I am active in the “separation of school and state” movement, whose signatories will love your work, and the case it makes for undoing governemnt schooling. I will be reading and recommending your work among our ranks.
I think magazines will stick around until someone invents something better to read on the elliptical or treadmill. The form is still somewhat invaluable in certain environments. I still see far more reading being done than people watching things on their iPhone, etc. But over time …