Joshua Gillin
Apr. 2, 2013
4:16 pm
Bloomberg
On Bloomberg's "Market Makers," Newsweek/Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown tells Stephanie Ruhle that working in the news industry is a
constant battle between fulfillment and disappointment.
Brown says the business aspect of her work is more challenging than her love for journalism, a problem she says is widespread.
"We’re living in a time when everybody's so obsessed with delivery systems and gaming the system and, you know, business ... it's actually very, very soul destroying. We don't have enough respect for content anymore. In the end, without the great content, there are no numbers. You see again and again in the media this obsession with the numbers, this obsession with the audiences, this obsession with the demo, et cetera, but without the talent, without the people who do it, your company's worth nothing."
She continues to say that the news business has lost integrity because of this focus on the business by major media outlets.
"I think that there's less respect for the editorial process then there ever was amongst business folk. The people who write the checks basically think, you know, there's less the sense that editorial people could have some integrity and stay aloof sometimes from it a bit, not that you want to be arrogant, but that you really can say, 'this is business, this is news.' I think that a lot of people in media profession now feel too much of that has been eroded and there must be some respect for the integrity of news, otherwise we're going to be a very ill-informed nation."
Brown also talks about work-life balance, a timely discussion in the wake of the popularity of former Charleston (S.C.) Post & Courier reporter Allyson Bird's blog post
about why she quit the business.
Newsweek produced its final print edition in December,
resulting in layoffs as the property
prepared a plan for digital distribution, which began in January.
Previously:
Tina Brown: ‘I don’t actually go to newsstands anymore’ |
Newsweek covers, we will miss writing about you |
How have Newsweek’s covers changed since it went digital-only?
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Andrew Beaujon
Jan. 25, 2013
1:28 pm
Newsweek's
new cover hits every note that used to make its covers darlings of social media discussion: As the nation discusses gun policy, playwright David Mamet writes a fiery essay calling for "more armed citizens in the schools" and drawing a line from gun control to Marxism.
It's a classic, buzz-riling effort that holds its own among the best conversation-starters foisted on readers by Newsweek/Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown. But oddly, now that Newsweek is
no longer a print publication, online discussion of its covers seems to have lessened.
Is that because the digital covers
are less provocative than their print predecessors? Let's put 'em on the table and decide whether one of 2012's
best Internet trolls softened after it went digital.
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Julie Moos
Dec. 26, 2012
6:05 am
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Jeff Sonderman
Dec. 6, 2012
2:57 pm
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Andrew Beaujon
Nov. 9, 2012
4:20 pm
Commercial Observer
The New York Daily News
may not return to its Lower Manhattan offices for a year, owner Mort Zuckerman told a conference called Masters of Real Estate. Al Barbarino reports Zuckerman said the offices, which also house U.S. News & World Report, "were just destroyed” during Hurricane Sandy.
The law firm Proskauer Rose -- small world dept.: Proskauer Rose lawyer Bernard Plum
represented New York Times management in its recent negotiations with the newsroom Guild -- is housing the paper's sales staff. Many of the paper's Manhattan employees are working at the paper's printing plant in New Jersey, "with a portion of its reporters also in its Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens bureaus," Barbarino reports.
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 22, 2012
4:58 pm
Last week, Newsweek announced its
print product will end in December. On his CNN show this weekend, Howard Kurtz asked Newsweek/Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown whether the self-described "ultimate magazine junkie" thought it was "sad" that Newsweek "will vanish from the newsstands."
My own habits have changed so dramatically. I don't actually go to newsstands anymore. Even on stations now and in airports I find myself deciding that I'm going to opt for what is on my Kindle, you know, on the plane. And I walk through those planes I see everybody reading screens. So it's one of those things where, yes, I'm sorry because, you know, I feel a certain romance still for print and I always will, I still love books more than I love reading screens actually. But at the same time I know everything has changed, and I also want to go where our readers are. I mean, in the end, you know, you want to rise to your audience, not sort of decide you're going to just continue like some blind person who forgets it's no longer the silent movie era and now we're in the talkies.
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 19, 2012
8:48 am
AdAge | The New York Times | AP
People involved in the decision
to shutter Newsweek's print edition explain their motivations.
"
It's an enormously expensive undertaking that this decision gets us out from under,"
Newsweek/Daily Beast CEO Baba Shetty told Ad Age's Michael Learmonth. Producing the print edition of Newsweek costs about $40 million per year, Shetty said. A digital-only Newsweek will be "about perspective and framing around the themes that matter in the world today. It's about longer form, sitting back, taking it in and gaining perspective." The publications "have a claim to hugely influential audience that is incredibly engaged. We've seen a 40% increase in advertising on the Daily Beast in the past year and we are just scratching the surface of what we can do."
“You cannot actually change an era of enormous disruptive innovation,”
Newsweek/Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown told The New York Times' Christine Haughney and David Carr. Explaining Newsweek's
string of provocative covers, Brown said, “The magazine was incredibly moribund when we came in.... It had taken so many knocks. We have been able to bring Newsweek back to relevance."
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Andrew Beaujon and Julie Moos
Oct. 18, 2012
7:22 am
Newsweek
will publish its final print edition December 31, the company announced Thursday morning. It will launch a subscription product called Newsweek Global, some of whose content will be available on the Daily Beast. A note from Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown lays out the change:
In our judgment, we have reached a tipping point at which we can most efficiently and effectively reach our readers in all-digital format. This was not the case just two years ago. It will increasingly be the case in the years ahead.
Layoffs will accompany the move: "Regrettably we anticipate staff reductions and the streamlining of our editorial and business operations both here in the U.S. and internationally," Brown writes.
During an earnings call in July, IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller said Newsweek would
announce a digital plan for the magazine this fall. After Bloomberg's Edmund Lee (presciently) interpreted Diller's statement to mean
the magazine would eliminate its print edition,
Brown emailed staff to note that Diller "did not say on the earnings call as reported that Newsweek is going digital in September." Brown revealed today to The Wall Street Journal's Keach Hagey that these discussions were under way before then. "
We have been exploring it since June in a very aggressive way, because all the industry trends have told us that it was only a question of when, not if."
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Andrew Beaujon
Sep. 17, 2012
11:39 am
USA Today
USA Today columnist Michael Wolff, a big name brought in to stoke much-needed buzz at a legacy publication
trumpeting its reinvention as an Internet-age news organization,
slams Newsweek Editor Tina Brown for bringing in big names and trying to stoke much-needed buzz at the legacy publication she's trying to reinvent as an Internet-age news organization.
She is, in a sink hole of cost, trying to use old-media tricks to meld The Daily Beast and Newsweek into the kind of zeitgeist-shaping, buzz-creating, cocktail-party-fueling package that the media has, for so long, been built around -- part craft, part culture, part snobbery.
As if on cue, Newsweek
announced its new print cover Monday, one that fronts a story by Ayaan Hirsi Ali with the coverline "Muslim Rage." (Ali, I guess I should note, is married to Niall Ferguson, author of Newsweek's
most recent cover controversy.)
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