Newsweek swallowed by the Daily Beast

A merger between the online Daily Beast and Newsweek is expected to be announced tomorrow, according to the New York Times. The deal would put Tina Brown in charge of the print magazine and its website, and gives the Daily Beast website a print product to boost revenues.

Millionaire Sidney Harman recently bought Newsweek for $1 in exchange for taking on its debt. The magazine has lost much of its top staff in recent months.

From the Times:

Newsweek, bled by an exodus of staff members, a rapidly declining readership and a flight of advertisers, is a shell of what it used to be: a member of the prestigious club of weekly magazines that helped set the tone for news coverage.

Dr. Harman’s purchase was seen as a savior for the magazine and a way to help it build back its reputation. But he has struggled to find an editor for three months, leaving the magazine effectively rudderless.

But the Daily Beast partnership not only solves a problem for Dr. Harman, it gives Mr. Diller a print publication, something he has said recently he believes his website needs in order to be profitable.

Two more leave Newsweek

Investigative reporter Mark Hosenball is leaving Newsweek to join Reuters as "money and politics" reporter. Adam Kushner, senior editor for foreign coverage for Newsweek, is headed to the National Journal Group, where he'll be deputy magazine editor-in-chief. Both moves reported by Gorkana.

Rolling Stone gathers few comments

New media hawks have noted that Rolling Stone magazine failed to garner the attention it deserves on its website commensurate with the media attention it received for publishing Michael Hastings's profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal - you know, the article that apparently got the hand-picked commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan fired by the man who hand-picked him.
Here's how Nieman Journalism Lab saw it:

After the piece ran, it started picking up incoming links, presumably driving tremendous traffic to the site. I checked in on the story today, exactly 24 hours later, to find that, despite the story completely dominating the news cycle — TV, blogosphere, Twitter, newspapers — only 16 comments had been posted to the story (not counting a couple dozen comments responding to those comments). When you try to view all 16, you get a 404 error message. No users had “shared” or “liked” it, according to the story’s social media meter. (Although that’s probably an error — I tried liking it and it still says zero.) In any event, that’s rough — the vast majority of the conversation is happening elsewhere.

Does the lack of comments mean the story or the publisher failed in some way? Or does it show that most readers no longer worry about checking original sources for information, choosing instead to digest the fast-food version of complex and important news reports?

SFW

Since so many people do their web surfing during the day, while at work, Playboy has decided to launch several new sites, including TheSmokingJacket.com, which will have content that is safe to browse in the workplace. The strategy is part of Playboy's attempt to find new revenue, after a round of layoffs last year:

After noting that Playboy has cut over 100 positions since last year, its headcount is likely to shrink further from its current 573 employees.

Journalism making a difference

In response to an April 2 New York Times story about the growth of unpaid internships, and the legal gray area surrounding them, Atlantic Media, which owns The Atlantic magazine, decided to pay its interns retroactively to last year:

Thinking about the internship program through the lens of Saturday's New York Times story, we found ourselves revisiting the concept. We had thought this was the way to structure unpaid internships but if it sits near a grey zone, it's not for us.

Trend setters? Doubtful.

(From Daily Finance via Romenesko)

Gellman moves to Time

Pulitzer Prize-winner Barton Gellman, author of "Angler," is leaving the Washington Post for a job at Time magazine. Poynter

The 'loyal reader' metric

As news organizations discover better ways to measure online traffic, the focus of publishing could shift away from serving a mass audience to maintaining a loyal one. As a result, this could simultaneously liberate newsrooms from the pressure to generate hits at all costs and provide a more valuable metric with which to sell advertising.

Knight Digital Media talked with Slate editor David Plotz about what this could mean for content. Here's an excerpt (emphasis theirs):

“Until now we’ve been selling to the mass audience. Now once you have this ability to target you can really target your core audience… This creates strong incentive to create durable journalism,” Plotz said. “That one curious reader is worth 50 times the value of the drive-by reader. The person who makes a commitment to your brand, if you’re a quality brand….. if you can get those readers, a smaller set of readers, who come to you three or five or 10 times a week, you don’t have to go after that huge other set of readers.”

So forget celebrity and outrage stories. For Slate, this focus means a commitment to long form journalism such as a recent series on the American dental crisis, which Plotz estimates was read by 400,000 people. Slate has started a “Fresca Fellowship” that requires each reporter and editor to spend a month each year on a long form journalism project. Advertisers have begun to sponsor specific projects and they are paying for themselves, he said.

“Advertisers want to be around some ambitious project more than they want to be around some snarky political column,” Plotz said.

The approach won't work for every publication - and some publications won't want to do it since they equate influence with hits. But the "loyal readers" approach is familiar to journalism magazines and small- and medium-size newspapers, so it shouldn't require them to become niche publications to be successful.

UC Press goes Boom

The University of California Press plans to launch a scholarly magazine about California issues called Boom: A Journal of California.

From the release:

Headed by Editors Carolyn de la Peña, Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis and Director of the Davis Humanities Institute, and Louis Warren, UC Davis’ W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History, the journal will include a wide range of works ...

... according to de la Peña, “To truly grapple with the crisis facing California, we have to gather new knowledge about who we are, how we got here, and what common ground can be built for the future. By featuring the work of researchers in multiple fields and combining that with community voices, we believe Boom will uncover fresh perspectives on the state we're in.”

Nonprofits have lots of room to bloom given the gaps left by the cuts to statewide coverage at California's largest newspapers.

A specialized diet at Readers Digest

To survive both the decline in print and America's great differentiation, the now-bankrupt Readers Digest plans to transform itself from a general-interest publication into something better suited to our fragmented society.

As Robert Rector observes, Readers Digest once traded on a caricature of the upright, white, suburban middle-class family and, in doing so, gained a broad audience in an America that strove to be a being part of that world. The Internet has punctuated and amplified the cracks in this worldview, and now Readers Digest must become a caricature of itself. It will strip away the veneer of mainstream appeal and follow the cultural guideposts of the sect called American conservative.

Rector writes:

...the Digest, after years of trying to broaden its appeal, is being pushed in a decidedly conservative direction.

It is cutting down on celebrity profiles and ramping up on inspiring spiritual stories. Out are generic how-to magazine features; in are articles about military life. ...

Indeed, the Digest plans to introduce a new multifaceted effort produced with Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor, called the Purpose Driven Connection. For about $30, subscribers get a quarterly magazine with religious workbooks, along with DVDs featuring Warren, and membership in a social-networking Web site, including tips on what to pray for each week. It is available through churches and at Wal-Marts.

Surf's not up

The average time we spend on the Web has plateaued at about 12 hours per week, according to an annual survey, up from less than six hours a week in 2004. Faster Broadband speeds are given partial credit, since people don't have to sit wait as long for pages or videos to load. Researchers also say people are more accustomed to what's on the Web, meaning they are just surfing around but go online to find particular sites.

All of this could be an anomaly, of course, but the researchers seem to think we've hit a high water mark. Also, the survey uses self-reported data, and people do tend to play down how much time they spend on leisure activities, such as watching TV.

Some good news in the report for newspapers and magazines, though:

The report, released Monday, also indicates relative stabilization in other media channels, most notably newspaper and magazine reading.

Then there's this exchange with one of the study's analysts:

Ad Age: Some traditional media have actually shown less decline than what one might think, from the headlines. People reported no change in their TV habits from 2004 to 2009; they reported a 6% drop in magazine reading, although it appeared flat over the past year; and while newspaper reading has dropped 17% since 2004, it appears flat over the past year.

Ms. Rousseau-Anderson: Yes. Many people expected huge drops but as mentioned above, people aren't deserting traditional media and fully jumping to digital yet.

All apologies

Politico's story catching the Washington Post with its ethics down has caused repercussions inside and outside the newspaper. Post publisher Katharine Weymouth wrote a long letter to readers apologizing for a flier that promised corporate-sponsored off-the-record meetings between editorial staff, White House officials and paying lobbyists. She's also asked for an internal review of what happened and talked with the newsroom staff.

All the hullabaloo inspired Talking Points Memo to report that the Atlantic magazine has been holding corporate-sponsored salons since 2003. Atlantic Media publisher David Bradley responded with a long letter of his own.

Rolling Stone shrinks

Rolling Stone Mexico is kaput.

A new way to read the news

Plastic Logic has developed a digital reader for magazines and newspapers that's flexible. From NY Observer:

Plastic Logic is developing an e-reader with a display that is about 8.5 inches wide and 10.7 inches long—the same size as most magazines and nearly twice the size of the Kindle screen (and more than four times the size of iPhone and Blackberry interfaces—where many of us skim our New York Times headlines in the morning).

Their prototype is made out of plastic, so it’s lightweight, and thinner than a pad of paper... the company’s “secret sauce” is its flexible screen, which can feel a bit like a magazine and has an added bonus of making the device nearly unbreakable.

I noticed an ad for a Kindle ran with the online version of this story.

New publisher for LA Times magazine

Editor and Publisher has a short profile of Penn Jones, the recently named publisher of LA, the now monthly magazine from the business side of the Los Angeles Times. Jones seems excited about the job:

Jones said: “LA is flying. The magazine is successfully connecting with The Times influential Southern California audience and with advertisers who feel LA’s editorial environment is one they need to be part of. That connectivity is key and we intend to build LA’s brand as the city’s bright, distinctive voice.”

Selling out

Perhaps it was inevitable.

Hobbled by bad circulation, newspapers and magazines have searched for a miracle to restore hope and revenue to their paper-based delivery systems. The journey sometimes led them down dead-end paths of celebrity gossip - a recession proof industry - and irrelevant but entertaining first-person accounts of reporters' lives.

Now, thanks to Barack Obama, the resistable has become irresistable. A rare combination of political leader, cultural touchstone and a celebrity, Obama is newsworthy and he sells papers. No tough ethical debates, no boring Fourth Estate rants, just big photos and long, languishing thumbsuckers:

The morning after the election, Barack Obama's supporters were not the only ones celebrating. Newspaper and magazine publishers from Los Angeles to New York had reason to be happy as well. After years of losing readers to the Internet, steep declines in advertising revenue, publication closures and round after round of layoffs, the print industry witnessed something it hasn't seen in a long time: sold-out newsstands.

-snip-

"You can't save and treasure a PDF file off of your computer. That's the transcendence of print that everyone in print has talked about, a certain tangible quality that can't be translated online for certain big momentous events."

The analysis glosses over an important fact. A media that depends on a powerful political figure for revenue has an even greater burden to show it can and will hold that powerful political figure accountable - memorabilia collectors be damned. After all, what's the point of selling out if you've sold out.

Even magazines are doing it

Condé Nast, which owns the New Yorker and Vanity Fair among others, told its publishers to trim 5 percent of their staff and cut 5 percent from their budgets. Condé Nast's Portfolio will take an even bigger hit, slashing 20 percent of its staff and publisher only 10 times a year.

Not to be outdone, Time Inc. plans to cut 6 percent of its staff - about 600 jobs. The companies best known properties are Sports Illustrated, People, Time and Fortune. That's about 600 jobs. From the New York Times:

No magazines are scheduled to close, but some are likely to be severely cut back. Ann S. Moore, Time Inc.’s chairman and chief executive, was already planning an overhaul because of the upheavals in print media, but she was forced to speed up those efforts amid the financial crisis and looming recession.