10 ms·

No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists

140 points by smacktoward 7y ago

notjustanymike 7y ago
I worked there 10 years ago and couldn't tell you then. Newsweek had 300 staff and two IT departments: one for PC, one for Mac. Around 30 people total. Newsweek was independent, so it had its own HR and legal teams. It had 4 people just to lay out ads in the magazine, even though they could all have been replaced with software. Newsweek was owned by Washington Post, then Sidney Harman, then IAC. It was never profitable. When we were acquired, rumor was we were losing $70 million a year. Newsweek.com ran a full page takeover ad for scabies medicine. A gross scabies covered old man back was the first thing visitors saw on our homepage.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Maybe someone needs them to exist? There's an opinion I've heard repeatedly on HN that the main reason Google is interested in paying Mozilla for the browser default is that they need Firefox to exist, as something they can point legislators to when they start saying words like "monopoly". Maybe something similar is happening here?
  - Tade0 7y ago
    IIRC any new web standard requires "at least two independent implementations" in order to be accepted.
tyingq 7y ago
I'm curious what news will look like in another decade or so. Television news is dying, print news is dead. Online news is driven by what Google, Facebook, and Twitter reward. And they are all influencing it (AMP, labeling, selective promotion, etc).
- smitty1e 7y ago
  I'm thinking that the Patreon-style business model becomes something, as we identify semi-reliable voices and decide to make sure the Lee Stranahans[1] of the world can keep doing what they do. [1] https://citizenjournalismschool.com/ https://citizenjournalismschool.com/
  - gowld 7y ago
    Patronage, and donations in general, might be something, but 99% of people will choose "empty calorie" news like they do for food, because it's less effort and less short term cost and more emotionally filing than finding anything better to consume.
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      There's also a problem with patronage, which is that people may not end up producing content that would infuriate the people directly paying them. News organizations pre-Internet got around this by being too big to ignore for marketers, and by attempting to firewall newsrooms and advertising.
      - malandrew 7y ago
        > that people may not end up producing content that would infuriate the people directly paying them. that's no different from the status quo. the only thing that changes is that the people paying directly are readers not advertisers.
      - ConceptJunkie 7y ago
        > There's also a problem with patronage, which is that people may not end up producing content that would infuriate the people directly paying them. That's already a huge problem. While these are obviously not news, look at Reddit, the NBA, Hollywood and other organizations which are openly kowtowing to their patrons. Most news organizations already serve an agenda over the truth (and hardly even pretend otherwise), and identifying objective sources is harder than ever.
bruceb 7y ago
"A screenshot of Newsweek’s internal Chartbeat. In May 2019, 0 percent of Newsweek’s traffic came from readers going to Newsweek.com directly." 100% clickbait.
starpilot 7y ago
Incredible editors' note on one of the events mentioned in the article: > Note From the Editors: As we were reporting this story, Newsweek Media Group fired Newsweek Editor Bob Roe, Executive Editor Ken Li and Senior Politics Reporter Celeste Katz for doing their jobs. https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-manhattan-da-olivet-university-david-jang-fired-new-york-media-813949 https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-manhattan-da-olivet-univer...
RickJWagner 7y ago
I think we're witnessing some kind of death cycle for a magazine. When I was much younger (say 40 years ago), I loved Newsweek. Maybe I was just naive, but I seem to remember interesting stories and good, even-handed reporting. Then I started disliking Newsweek a few decades later. I tend to be conservative, and to my eyes the magazine seemed to lean way too far left, consistently. They frequently seemed to run articles I didn't care for, so my opinion of them slipped considerably. Now this article tells us the magazine has been printing articles from Newt Gingrich, Ben Shapiro, etc. These are definitely right-side of the political spectrum. Was I wrong about the left-leaning? It seems like some kind of fatal flailing. I think Newsweek has been ill for decades.
- robk 7y ago
  No you were right before
- jrumbut 7y ago
  I recall the old reputation was that Time and Newsweek were considered centrist publications, with Time a hair to the right and Newsweek about two hairs to the left. This was a reputation, based on 0 hard evidence, but if I recall a commonly held one among news magazine readers of the late 90s. I have been consciously subscribing to my local newspapers (I live in the Northeast, so there are excellent ones like the Boston Globe and Providence Journal) and just reading them and what gets recorded there and nowhere else it is horrifying to think of a world without them. If the mayor of your city is a supervillain terrorizing the town by night, who's going to tell you? The police chief he hired? The social media site who got a huge incentive package to set up shop there? We're very lucky to have the tradition of journalism, with all its flaws past and present. I think we all need to take responsibility for preserving it.
dmix 7y ago
Their first big feature being a totally wrong Satoshi article was really perfect. I'm surprised they're still around TBH...
mc32 7y ago
It’s a shame. Google and other social media are kind of forcing news orgs to churn out garbage clickbait. It’s quite s disservice how they are incentivized to produce reaction or outrage rather than things that deserve being reported on because actual newsworthy things don’t pay the bills in the age of SEO and “engagement.”
Overtonwindow 7y ago
A lot of magazines have become more advertising than content, and survive on that and a small base of subscribers. I look at Wired magazine, comparing to what it was 20 years ago, it’s vastly more advertising now.
seanwilson 7y ago
> My original contract stipulated that I had to bring in a minimum of ten thousand unique readers a month, an impossibly high number that my editor told me to ignore. The world, US, and business desks were meant to write “legitimate” stories that went on the front page, while a “Continuous News Desk,” later renamed “Breaking News,” spammed Google News and paid our salaries. Drafting off the BuzzFeed News model that had developed months earlier, Jeffrey Rothfeder, our Editor-in-Chief, said that the clickbait would bring in revenue while hard-news reporting would build our reputation. > Last year, in response to complaints from reporters, Newsweek added group bonuses, meaning a news desk’s traffic-per-reporter was averaged and everyone could receive a small payout if certain goals were reached. The intent was for less popular but important beats, like climate change, to be balanced out by more popular stories in the same section. When the individual bonus system changed, these group bonuses were eliminated entirely, though editors can now nominate writers for bonuses based on journalistic excellence, regardless of readership. > But the reality is that if you aren’t writing clickbait, the bonuses can be hard to get. And failing to get a traffic bonus, some said, puts a target on your back. So news is completely broken - what's the solution? Are people less informed about the world now compared to several decades ago because of the above?
- mpiedrav 7y ago
  Audiences are "parainformed": not informed about the really important (but "boring") topics and not necessarily told lies all the time, but fed data that apparently seems relevant, but in fact is a lot of noise with a hint of signal (for the sake of advertising profits). A solution is not following the news, but rather reading expert insights about current events (root causes of massive inmigration, drug wars and the involvement of three-lettered federal agencies, deregulation of private healthcare and higher education, etc.)
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    > A solution is not following the news, but rather reading expert insights about current events (root causes of massive inmigration, drug wars and the involvement of three-lettered federal agencies, deregulation of private healthcare and higher education, etc.) But... but that would lead to the public turning against those responsible for these things. Cannot let that happen! Sarcasm aside: there is an insane amount of money and profits involved and I am not sure how a publication that delivers proper journalism is supposed to be financed. The funding needs to be massive to account for headcount as well as legal defense, a lot of advertising to tell people about its existence, and it should not be ads (create an implicit threat on the publication to not report on those who book ads), philantropists (people rich enough to fund a newspaper are exactly those people that should be investigated) or taxes (politicians can cut these at any moment)...
tehjoker 7y ago
I keep beating the same drum but it's a worthwhile drum to beat: Why not publicly fund the news (like the BBC but without the license fees)? If such funding would make you worry about the news becoming state TV, consider that your current options are (approximately) clickbait, MSNBC (blue state TV) and Fox (red state TV), or otherwise highly compromised and underfunded.
- asperous 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR
  - pbourke 7y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica
  - jakecopp 7y ago
    Could an American please explain whether NPR is popular domestically/your friend group or why not if it's a low percentage? I never hear about NPR from Australia, but the BBC is legendary. The Aussie ABC is the most trusted source of news in Australia: http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/8064-abc-remains-most-trusted-media-201907220424 http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/8064-abc-remains-most-trus...
    - garmaine 7y ago
      NPR is quite popular, and a reliable news source. It’s probably comparable to ABC or Canada’s CBC from what I understand. Certain people do claim it has a liberal bias, although like the BBC it is only slightly left of center, if anything. It does depend greatly on WHICH npr station and which shows you listen to though. The national shows are very high quality, but some local stations do broadcast all sorts of craziness aside from the national syndicated shows.
    - cpeterso 7y ago
      NPR is popular among liberals and reviled by conservatives, though its content is pretty neutral. In its attempt to share many sides of stories, NPR is accused by various groups of both liberal and conservative bias and pro- and anti-Israel bias. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR_controversies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR_controversies
russellbeattie 7y ago
Just today I read a story about Trump's claim of a wall in Colorado [1] and the third paragraph has this insanity (which as of right now still hasn't been corrected!!): "Of the states mentioned in the speech, only New Mexico and Texas share a border with Mexico. Colorado is landlocked and hundreds of thousands of miles away from the Mexican border, as is Kansas." Who in the world do they have writing there?? And there's no copy editors or proof readers?? Crazy. 1. https://www.newsweek.com/president-trump-claims-were-building-wall-colorado-governor-suggests-trump-learn-basic-1467409 https://www.newsweek.com/president-trump-claims-were-buildin...
- russellbeattie 7y ago
  Huh. This is a relevant and topical comment, with a link to a story that's still incorrect in a ridiculous way, exactly illustrating the original article's point about Newsweek's lowered standards as they rush to publish and hire low paid writers on contract. Is there some sort of auto-flag for using the T-word? Does HN have reading comprehension issues? Am I shadow banned or something?
  - russellbeattie 7y ago
    And again. How long will this go on I wonder?
lurquer 7y ago
The average person lacks the attention span to read a page of text. Reading a good portion of a newspaper? Ha. Those days are over, and they are not coming back for a few generations. I don't know what the solution is. As recently as 20 years ago, you'd see people reading newspapers or magazines. When was the last time you ever saw anyone read something on paper? Now you have subway trains full of people clicking from one subject to another on their phones... there's no coming back from this.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  How many of those people were reading every article end-to-end, rather than flipping through from one subject to another? I certainly didn't read newspapers that way, and they don't really seem like they're laid out to accommodate it.
  - lurquer 7y ago
    Not everyone read Time and Newsweek cover to cover back in the day. But, quite a few did. (Especially if they were constipated.)
dredmorbius 7y ago
Travel through any US city not named "New York" or "Washington", pick up a newspaper, and ask yourself the same question. The claim that the average person in the US is better served by reading a newspaper than by even modestly earnest online news reporting simply is not true, though the floor is likely higher for print. I've spent a few weeks in several of the country's largest metro areas. The leading newspaper is invariably aememic, has frequently long been a punch line among late-night comedians, has outsourced virtually all its news (and editorial) coverage, frequently runs agency filings as front-page and major news briefings. The front page itself rarely carries actual news, being instead dominated by sport, weather, culture, and occasional leads to large stories. Business reporting is all but nonexistent (though the degree to which this reflects reality is an open question). The most rigorously investigated reporting is in the obituary section. What's clear is that the newspapers have lost any concept of what useful purpose they might serve. The name of the city doesn't matter -- you could pick virtually any in the country and see the same situation.

140 points by smacktoward 7y ago

I worked there 10 years ago and couldn't tell you then. Newsweek had 300 staff and two IT departments: one for PC, one for Mac. Around 30 people total. Newsweek was independent, so it had its own HR and legal teams. It had 4 people just to lay out ads in the magazine, even though they could all have been replaced with software. Newsweek was owned by Washington Post, then Sidney Harman, then IAC. It was never profitable. When we were acquired, rumor was we were losing $70 million a year. Newsweek.com ran a full page takeover ad for scabies medicine. A gross scabies covered old man back was the first thing visitors saw on our homepage.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Maybe someone needs them to exist? There's an opinion I've heard repeatedly on HN that the main reason Google is interested in paying Mozilla for the browser default is that they need Firefox to exist, as something they can point legislators to when they start saying words like "monopoly". Maybe something similar is happening here?
- Tade0 7y ago
  IIRC any new web standard requires "at least two independent implementations" in order to be accepted.

tyingq 7y ago

I'm curious what news will look like in another decade or so. Television news is dying, print news is dead. Online news is driven by what Google, Facebook, and Twitter reward. And they are all influencing it (AMP, labeling, selective promotion, etc).

smitty1e 7y ago
I'm thinking that the Patreon-style business model becomes something, as we identify semi-reliable voices and decide to make sure the Lee Stranahans[1] of the world can keep doing what they do. [1] https://citizenjournalismschool.com/ https://citizenjournalismschool.com/
- gowld 7y ago
  Patronage, and donations in general, might be something, but 99% of people will choose "empty calorie" news like they do for food, because it's less effort and less short term cost and more emotionally filing than finding anything better to consume.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    There's also a problem with patronage, which is that people may not end up producing content that would infuriate the people directly paying them. News organizations pre-Internet got around this by being too big to ignore for marketers, and by attempting to firewall newsrooms and advertising.
    - malandrew 7y ago
      > that people may not end up producing content that would infuriate the people directly paying them. that's no different from the status quo. the only thing that changes is that the people paying directly are readers not advertisers.
    - ConceptJunkie 7y ago
      > There's also a problem with patronage, which is that people may not end up producing content that would infuriate the people directly paying them. That's already a huge problem. While these are obviously not news, look at Reddit, the NBA, Hollywood and other organizations which are openly kowtowing to their patrons. Most news organizations already serve an agenda over the truth (and hardly even pretend otherwise), and identifying objective sources is harder than ever.

bruceb 7y ago

"A screenshot of Newsweek’s internal Chartbeat. In May 2019, 0 percent of Newsweek’s traffic came from readers going to Newsweek.com directly." 100% clickbait.

starpilot 7y ago

Incredible editors' note on one of the events mentioned in the article: > Note From the Editors: As we were reporting this story, Newsweek Media Group fired Newsweek Editor Bob Roe, Executive Editor Ken Li and Senior Politics Reporter Celeste Katz for doing their jobs. https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-manhattan-da-olivet-university-david-jang-fired-new-york-media-813949 https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-manhattan-da-olivet-univer...

RickJWagner 7y ago

I think we're witnessing some kind of death cycle for a magazine. When I was much younger (say 40 years ago), I loved Newsweek. Maybe I was just naive, but I seem to remember interesting stories and good, even-handed reporting. Then I started disliking Newsweek a few decades later. I tend to be conservative, and to my eyes the magazine seemed to lean way too far left, consistently. They frequently seemed to run articles I didn't care for, so my opinion of them slipped considerably. Now this article tells us the magazine has been printing articles from Newt Gingrich, Ben Shapiro, etc. These are definitely right-side of the political spectrum. Was I wrong about the left-leaning? It seems like some kind of fatal flailing. I think Newsweek has been ill for decades.

robk 7y ago
No you were right before
jrumbut 7y ago
I recall the old reputation was that Time and Newsweek were considered centrist publications, with Time a hair to the right and Newsweek about two hairs to the left. This was a reputation, based on 0 hard evidence, but if I recall a commonly held one among news magazine readers of the late 90s. I have been consciously subscribing to my local newspapers (I live in the Northeast, so there are excellent ones like the Boston Globe and Providence Journal) and just reading them and what gets recorded there and nowhere else it is horrifying to think of a world without them. If the mayor of your city is a supervillain terrorizing the town by night, who's going to tell you? The police chief he hired? The social media site who got a huge incentive package to set up shop there? We're very lucky to have the tradition of journalism, with all its flaws past and present. I think we all need to take responsibility for preserving it.

dmix 7y ago

Their first big feature being a totally wrong Satoshi article was really perfect. I'm surprised they're still around TBH...

mc32 7y ago

It’s a shame. Google and other social media are kind of forcing news orgs to churn out garbage clickbait. It’s quite s disservice how they are incentivized to produce reaction or outrage rather than things that deserve being reported on because actual newsworthy things don’t pay the bills in the age of SEO and “engagement.”

Overtonwindow 7y ago

A lot of magazines have become more advertising than content, and survive on that and a small base of subscribers. I look at Wired magazine, comparing to what it was 20 years ago, it’s vastly more advertising now.

seanwilson 7y ago

> My original contract stipulated that I had to bring in a minimum of ten thousand unique readers a month, an impossibly high number that my editor told me to ignore. The world, US, and business desks were meant to write “legitimate” stories that went on the front page, while a “Continuous News Desk,” later renamed “Breaking News,” spammed Google News and paid our salaries. Drafting off the BuzzFeed News model that had developed months earlier, Jeffrey Rothfeder, our Editor-in-Chief, said that the clickbait would bring in revenue while hard-news reporting would build our reputation. > Last year, in response to complaints from reporters, Newsweek added group bonuses, meaning a news desk’s traffic-per-reporter was averaged and everyone could receive a small payout if certain goals were reached. The intent was for less popular but important beats, like climate change, to be balanced out by more popular stories in the same section. When the individual bonus system changed, these group bonuses were eliminated entirely, though editors can now nominate writers for bonuses based on journalistic excellence, regardless of readership. > But the reality is that if you aren’t writing clickbait, the bonuses can be hard to get. And failing to get a traffic bonus, some said, puts a target on your back. So news is completely broken - what's the solution? Are people less informed about the world now compared to several decades ago because of the above?

mpiedrav 7y ago
Audiences are "parainformed": not informed about the really important (but "boring") topics and not necessarily told lies all the time, but fed data that apparently seems relevant, but in fact is a lot of noise with a hint of signal (for the sake of advertising profits). A solution is not following the news, but rather reading expert insights about current events (root causes of massive inmigration, drug wars and the involvement of three-lettered federal agencies, deregulation of private healthcare and higher education, etc.)
- mschuster91 7y ago
  > A solution is not following the news, but rather reading expert insights about current events (root causes of massive inmigration, drug wars and the involvement of three-lettered federal agencies, deregulation of private healthcare and higher education, etc.) But... but that would lead to the public turning against those responsible for these things. Cannot let that happen! Sarcasm aside: there is an insane amount of money and profits involved and I am not sure how a publication that delivers proper journalism is supposed to be financed. The funding needs to be massive to account for headcount as well as legal defense, a lot of advertising to tell people about its existence, and it should not be ads (create an implicit threat on the publication to not report on those who book ads), philantropists (people rich enough to fund a newspaper are exactly those people that should be investigated) or taxes (politicians can cut these at any moment)...

tehjoker 7y ago

I keep beating the same drum but it's a worthwhile drum to beat: Why not publicly fund the news (like the BBC but without the license fees)? If such funding would make you worry about the news becoming state TV, consider that your current options are (approximately) clickbait, MSNBC (blue state TV) and Fox (red state TV), or otherwise highly compromised and underfunded.

asperous 7y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR
- pbourke 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica
- jakecopp 7y ago
  Could an American please explain whether NPR is popular domestically/your friend group or why not if it's a low percentage? I never hear about NPR from Australia, but the BBC is legendary. The Aussie ABC is the most trusted source of news in Australia: http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/8064-abc-remains-most-trusted-media-201907220424 http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/8064-abc-remains-most-trus...
  - garmaine 7y ago
    NPR is quite popular, and a reliable news source. It’s probably comparable to ABC or Canada’s CBC from what I understand. Certain people do claim it has a liberal bias, although like the BBC it is only slightly left of center, if anything. It does depend greatly on WHICH npr station and which shows you listen to though. The national shows are very high quality, but some local stations do broadcast all sorts of craziness aside from the national syndicated shows.
  - cpeterso 7y ago
    NPR is popular among liberals and reviled by conservatives, though its content is pretty neutral. In its attempt to share many sides of stories, NPR is accused by various groups of both liberal and conservative bias and pro- and anti-Israel bias. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR_controversies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR_controversies

russellbeattie 7y ago

Just today I read a story about Trump's claim of a wall in Colorado [1] and the third paragraph has this insanity (which as of right now still hasn't been corrected!!): "Of the states mentioned in the speech, only New Mexico and Texas share a border with Mexico. Colorado is landlocked and hundreds of thousands of miles away from the Mexican border, as is Kansas." Who in the world do they have writing there?? And there's no copy editors or proof readers?? Crazy. 1. https://www.newsweek.com/president-trump-claims-were-building-wall-colorado-governor-suggests-trump-learn-basic-1467409 https://www.newsweek.com/president-trump-claims-were-buildin...

russellbeattie 7y ago
Huh. This is a relevant and topical comment, with a link to a story that's still incorrect in a ridiculous way, exactly illustrating the original article's point about Newsweek's lowered standards as they rush to publish and hire low paid writers on contract. Is there some sort of auto-flag for using the T-word? Does HN have reading comprehension issues? Am I shadow banned or something?
- russellbeattie 7y ago
  And again. How long will this go on I wonder?

lurquer 7y ago

The average person lacks the attention span to read a page of text. Reading a good portion of a newspaper? Ha. Those days are over, and they are not coming back for a few generations. I don't know what the solution is. As recently as 20 years ago, you'd see people reading newspapers or magazines. When was the last time you ever saw anyone read something on paper? Now you have subway trains full of people clicking from one subject to another on their phones... there's no coming back from this.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
How many of those people were reading every article end-to-end, rather than flipping through from one subject to another? I certainly didn't read newspapers that way, and they don't really seem like they're laid out to accommodate it.
- lurquer 7y ago
  Not everyone read Time and Newsweek cover to cover back in the day. But, quite a few did. (Especially if they were constipated.)

dredmorbius 7y ago

Travel through any US city not named "New York" or "Washington", pick up a newspaper, and ask yourself the same question. The claim that the average person in the US is better served by reading a newspaper than by even modestly earnest online news reporting simply is not true, though the floor is likely higher for print. I've spent a few weeks in several of the country's largest metro areas. The leading newspaper is invariably aememic, has frequently long been a punch line among late-night comedians, has outsourced virtually all its news (and editorial) coverage, frequently runs agency filings as front-page and major news briefings. The front page itself rarely carries actual news, being instead dominated by sport, weather, culture, and occasional leads to large stories. Business reporting is all but nonexistent (though the degree to which this reflects reality is an open question). The most rigorously investigated reporting is in the obituary section. What's clear is that the newspapers have lost any concept of what useful purpose they might serve. The name of the city doesn't matter -- you could pick virtually any in the country and see the same situation.