Sure It'll Still Be Old News, But At Least It Will Be More Expensive!

Bleeding red ink, Newsweek embarks this week on a bold new strategy, aiming to attract highbrow, affluent readers by focusing on politics and public policy, deemphasizing straight news and playing up opinion and editorializing, and publishing its issues on heavier stock, glossy paper.

Plans also include doubling the subscription price so as to purposefully chase away half of its current three million subscribers.

Risky?  Maybe.  Crazy? Perhaps. Insane in the truly clinical sense of the word? Possibly.  The natural outcome of a six-day bender spent ingesting large quantities of Qualudes, methamphetamine and cheap gin?  Conceiva…

Wait, where were we going with this?

Oh, yes. The bold change in strategy.  Hoping to chase away the ignorant swine who today can barely scrape together twenty-five bucks for a year’s subscription, editor John Meacham expects it’s new high-class readership, the kind of tycoons who can easily fork over fifty bucks, will flock to the newly erudite glossy weekly and in so doing attract advertisers that will pay plenty to reach them.

Without question, Newsweek’s move will upend the competitive landscape of the newsweeklies so don’t be surprised if you see the following developments:

The Economist is clearly in the crosshairs of John Meacham who is a longtime fan.  However, the British newsweekly will not so easily give up its grip on affluent, social climbing status seekers to whom it has long appealed and so will up the ante by printing its American edition entirely in French.  It is not believed that circulation will take too big a hit as internal research strongly suggests that as many as three-quarters of American readers never actually open the magazine, preferring to leave it conspicuously on coffee tables or tucked under their arms as they walk briskly down the street to buy Maxim.

Time Magazine, long the BMOC of American newsweeklies, cannot afford to be seen as missing the latest trend in publishing and so will begin printing issues on the same stock used for restaurant menus and increase its newsstand price to $20 an issue, noting in its advertising, “let the ignorant riffraff buy Newsweek.”  Reporters will be told to avoid unbiased recitations of the week’s news and instead focus on 100% unsubstantiated opinion. One longtime staff journalist will quit in protest but will later return when he realized he’d gotten the meaning of the memo backwards.

US News and World Report, having long ago dropped below 1.5 million subscribers for its print edition will point out that it was “way ahead of the curve on that one” and its three remaining staffers will take a rare night off before returning to their typical 16-hour workdays putting out the online edition in the hope that maybe this will be the week they get a paying reader.

The New York Times, unwilling to cede readers to what it perceives to be Newsweek’s clear attempt to woo away it’s core demographic, will begin publishing its Sunday Magazine insert on planks of wood.   There will be nothing written on the planks beyond a Givenchy ad on the assumption that its readership is so highbrow and savvy there’s nothing they could tell them that they don’t already know.

Regardless of how the this all turns out, it will be interesting to watch as these media giants battle over that rarest of demographics: The affluent reader willing to pay for quality content that is varied, intelligent, challenging and timely.

And who doesn’t have access to a broadband connection.

J.