Redesign, ‘more photos’ to accompany staff cuts at Newsweek
Newsweek is expected to lay off staffers today.
Accompanying the reduction will be what the Wall Street Journal calls “a major makeover” that will find the ailing magazine with more photos, more opinion and a deliberately smaller circulation.
The WSJ’s Russell Adams and Shira Ovide report:
Newsweek is seeking in part to mirror publications like the Economist, which has thrived in a tough market by focusing less on costly news gathering than on driving discussion of the day’s issues.
This week’s cover story, “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage,” is a case in point. The story spawned an organized campaign to get readers to cancel their subscriptions and elicited so many angry emails that Newsweek Chief Executive Tom Ascheim had to open a new email account to handle the added volume, a company spokesman said.
It’s difficult for us to appreciate the rationale for cutting the subscriber base. Ad pages are down about 21 percent, the WSJ reports, so the idea would be to reduce printing and postage expenses by contracting the readership. Newsweek would then charge more per copy, suggesting to advertisers they have an audience worth paying a premium ad rate to reach.
Sounds pretty dumb to us, but what do we know?
Anyway, as to the redesign, Adams and Ovide report:
Mr. Ascheim has been working to give the magazine a more “contemporary” look, with more photos, according to former Newsweek employees. Some Newsweek staffers question how his vision will sit with [editor Jon Meacham], a historian who has overseen a cover story comparing Abraham Lincoln to Charles Darwin and another about Winston Churchill.
“There is no daylight between me and the business side on the direction we need to take. Covers like Lincoln v. Darwin is what the redesign is all about,” Mr. Meacham told The Wall Street Journal.
