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ThomOne commented on Betrayed by the Zeitgeist she once channeled, Tina Brown invokes it one last time

I read Newsweek for a decade plus. My parents had a subscription up until a year ago. When they canceled it was a useless bunch of ads and pretty pictures. I cannot understate how much Newsweek came to suck near the end. I remember hearing, perhaps incorrectly, that on the doomed Titanic they somehow made things worse by steering away from the iceberg. In the last few years Newsweek lost all identity. Maybe it's whole concept was suffering, but Newsweek killed everything that I enjoyed in it, mainly actual articles. Thoughtful multi-page articles were replaced by 6-pages of pictures with 10-word captions. They heard "print is unpopular" and thought "maybe if we just stop this news thing people will buy". It's a news magazine and it looks like Nickelodeon for kids. Someone should have lost their job over this instead of bringing the whole magazine down with this poorly thought out strategy of ditching meaningful content. I find the idea that this is part of a rapid transition away from print is absurd. Newsweek was grossly incompetent; They practically encouraged people to stop reading, I will miss Newsweek, but the magazine I loved died long ago, and its current shambling zombie existence needs to end. -Newspaper reading 26 year old.

Posted on December 23rd, 2012 11:50am