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

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.

> 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...

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).

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.

100% clickbait.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.”

"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...