Time alone has this year redesigned its website and print editions, upped its newsstand price by one dollar, and suffered about 50 layoffs.

"I worry about the future of newsweeklies," said Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. "I don't know what their relevance is in the world today. The model has changed so much; the world has moved to a 24-7 pace. I don't know how they fit it anymore."

The constant pulse of the Web, says Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, “has pushed newspapers to become more like the newsmagazines were in '82, and it's pushed the newsmagazines to produce a monthly-quality product on a weekly basis.”

How is this going to happen? Time political columnist Joe Klein says that the role of writers is going to become more important as writer-reporters gather their own facts and experience news for themselves. Time managing editor Richard Stengel hopes for Time to become a reader guide to separating out quality reporting in an age of information overload.

Tom Rosenstiel, however, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism and a former chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek, is less optimistic. “People have been predicting the demise of the newsweekly since the invention of television, but I think we may have really finally reached a point of real change. The basic conundrum they face is, 'What can you offer on a weekly basis in a 24-hour news culture?'"

Where newsmagazines may have difficulty adapting longer-form journalism to the 24-7 news age, newspapers should be able to succeed. With the addition of more magazine-like content to print editions and the movement of daily breaking news to the Internet, newspapers could spread their different types of high-quality content and flourish under the pressure of the digital age.


Source: American Journalism Review