
No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists - smacktoward
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/newsweek.php
======
notjustanymike
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
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
IIRC any new web standard requires "at least two independent implementations"
in order to be accepted.

------
starpilot
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-
univer...](https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-manhattan-da-olivet-university-
david-jang-fired-new-york-media-813949)

------
tyingq
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).

~~~
fossuser
Podcasts? I happily pay for Preet Bharara’s Cafe Insider podcast and the
lawfare blog podcast is also really good.

There’s a bit of a podcast discovery issue, but good ones are extremely high
quality and much better than TV news.

~~~
save_ferris
I agree that those are great sources for news, but a major shortcoming of
those types of programs is coverage of local news.

We are in very real danger of losing the press as an overseer of local
government, which will have major detrimental effects long-term for so many
communities, since local government is so much more directly impactful on our
lives than the federal government is.

~~~
organsnyder
A couple of impacts I've noticed due to the decline of local journalism:

\- I've found myself often becoming informed directly from my municipality
(Facebook posts, press releases on their website...) rather than news
reporting _about_ the municipality. While I feel I'm engaged enough to notice
when something seems off, the lack of critical reporting is undoubtedly
detrimental.

\- AstroTurf faux-local sites with political agendas are springing up to fill
the void:
[https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/2019/10...](https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/2019/10/21/lansing-
sun-new-sites-michigan-local-news-outlets/3984689002/)

~~~
trentlott
So who covers local intrigue, then?

To whom does one blow the whistle about corruption at City Hall? To the local
Sinclair afilliate?

I suspect NPR covers that for a lot of people; it might be correlated with why
some politicians are so eager to defund them completely.

~~~
Mathnerd314
At least in my town we have some tabloid newspapers, funded mostly by
restaurant/concert reviews, but that also publish letters every issue. Most
letters are minor but occasionally they do a full-page one about corruption or
similar. They also have freelance writers who publish the results of their
FOIA requests.

------
tehjoker
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.

~~~
smackay
Given that most democratic nations have a (relative) diversity of political
parties and opinions in principle that seems like a reasonable idea. However
unless you institute a strong system of oversight then the same problems with
commercial outlets apply just on a grander scale. A state broadcaster can just
as easily be co-opted to favour one political faction or another, if you get
the right journalists into the organisation.

Currently there is considerable disquiet in Scotland over the role that BBC
Scotland plays in suppressing the idea the the country should be independent.
The root of the problem appears to be that the Labour Party made a concerted
effort to have pro Labour journalists employed at the organisation. As a
result the output from the organisation is considerably pro-Union and against
the current Scottish Government.

You can take the following website with a pinch of salt if you like but it
does give a good example of how a state broadcaster can be perceived as being
actively against a given group or agenda despite the remit that they are
supposed to be a neutral player,

[https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/](https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/)

The current post is a great example.

~~~
paganel
We have similar issues with our State-supported broadcaster here in Romania.
Since a corrupt party came to power about 3 years ago (and also put its hands
on said broadcaster) its programming has become really partisan (on behalf of
said party and the latter’s world-view, of course). From what I’ve read online
similar things have been happening in neighboring Hungary and Poland.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Yeah, state tv will reflect the quality of your state. But I doubt private
media with comparable coverage does much better: if your state is corrupting
state media it isn't likely to let significant private actors be.

~~~
paganel
> if your state is corrupting state media it isn't likely to let significant
> private actors be.

Not necessarily. Yes, it can corrupt and control a big part of the private-
owned media too but there are always a couple of outlets which are relatively
free of direct State control. There are very few exceptions (like China, which
for this reason also is truly a dictatorial State) but afaik even Russia still
has some independent and relatively critic outlets towards Putin and his
people.

~~~
SiempreViernes
I mean, just empirically we can say that those free media aren't significant
enough to drive public opinion which is why the regime tolerates them.

------
bruceb
"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.

------
seanwilson
> 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
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
> 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)...

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

------
dredmorbius
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.

------
RickJWagner
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.

~~~
jrumbut
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.

------
Overtonwindow
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.

------
lurquer
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
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
Not everyone read Time and Newsweek cover to cover back in the day. But, quite
a few did. (Especially if they were constipated.)

------
mc32
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.”

------
russellbeattie
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-
buildin...](https://www.newsweek.com/president-trump-claims-were-building-
wall-colorado-governor-suggests-trump-learn-basic-1467409)

~~~
russellbeattie
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
And again. How long will this go on I wonder?

