Braking news for mags
Time and Newsweek retrench for a nonstop world
With cable news nets, wireless, on-demand and other forms of instant news yet-undiscovered jostling for consumers' attention, Time and Newsweek are reacting to identical problems in sharply different ways.
Newsstand sales, which measure what industry types call "heat," have slipped in the first nine months of the year at both Time (4%) and Newsweek (14%) to the mid-100,000s -- a sign that coverage of big events isn't moving copies like it used to.
"The newsweeklies are the print equivalent of the network evening news: They fill the same niche to older Americans, and they're facing the same questions about whether they should reinvent themselves," says media expert and Ad Age columnist Greg Lindsay.
But reinvention is taking different forms at the two mags.
At Newsweek, personalities now matter more than brand. Aided by a partnership with MSNBC, the mag's writers are becoming better known than Newsweek itself.
Fareed Zakaria's prominence on Newsweek.com, on ABC's "This Week," and, it seems, on every third episode of "The Daily Show," has brought the publication a cool intellectual glamour. And the cachet of writers Michael Isikoff, Jonathan Alter, Anna Quindlen and Allan Sloan goes well beyond their Newsweek affiliation.
So intent is the pub on making stars of its journalists that it has made them directors of their own movie -- literally. The mag shipped hand-held cameras to about 20 of its foreign correspondents and encouraged them to shoot video for the Web site.
"Our writers are always going on someone else's show," says publisher Greg Osberg. "With the Web we have our show."
Time, on the other hand, has maintained an aloof, Olympian tone. Apart from Joe Klein, its journos are largely anonymous. What the mag has done to differentiate itself is mine the rich sliver between news and service-journalism.
Deputy managing editor Steven Koepp points to a story about the Terry Schiavo case that advised how to create a living will: "We want to explain to people how things work and how it applies to them," he says.
The way the mag figures it, not only is 24-hour news not a hindrance, it's actually a marketing tool. After the Web and cable nets have primed Americans to think about a subject endlessly, Time swoops in to tell readers what it should mean to them. Recent notable Time covers include gay teens, global poverty and evolution -- zeitgeist stories with a spritz of utility.
The mags are far apart on other questions, too:
Newsweek has launched a college edition to woo youngsters. Time hasn't.
Newsweek is likely to use the Web to break stories from hard-nosed reporters like Isikoff. Time isn't.
Time plays the celeb game -- a Steven Spielberg "Munich" interview last week by Richard Schickel, whom the mag acknowledged as an occasional Spielberg collaborator), and profiles of J.K. Rowling, Paul McCartney, Condi Rice, Lauren Bacall. Newsweek doesn't. (Time also irks film critics by jumping review dates and writing features that are basically puffy reviews to enable the get.)
Fundamentally, of course, the mags remain more alike than they are different. Neither can ever fully deviate from what one wag calls "the regurgitative factor" -- publishing the week's events, summarized and contextualized.
"It's funny how differently they're thinking about this," Lindsay says. "They're really both in the same boat."
