(A guest blog post from Peter Meredith, The Daily Record’s acting special publications editor)
Can Newsweek reinvent itself as The Daily Beast?
As a traditional print magazine, it outlasted the newsweekly I worked for, U.S. News & World Report, by two years. U.S. News kept the things it was good at — political analysis and guides to colleges, grad schools, hospitals — and jettisoned the rest; Newsweek’s solution is more Huffington Post.
Time survives, but the days when newsmagazines brought the world to subscribers starved of thoughtful analysis in their local newspapers were over years ago.
At U.S. News there was an office myth that the average subscriber was a news-hungry oldster in St. Joseph, Mo. The day James Fallows was introduced as U.S. News’s editor in 1996 he laughed when he heard this and said he wanted to put out a magazine that would appeal to a software engineer in Palo Alto, Calif.
Ultimately, the software engineer didn’t want either U.S. News or Newsweek. Maybe she’ll read The Daily Beast.
