Definitely, a sad day for print. Newsweek will be publishing its final print issue this coming Monday. They just announced it online by releasing a digital version of their cover over Twitter a few hours ago (see tweet below).
Their farewell cover artwork highlights the stark contrast between traditional printing portrayed as a classic, black and white New York city skyline photo with Newsweek’s office building in the foreground and the modern, web-centric hashtag headline, #lastprintissue.
I’m was one of those who kept Newsweek issues for a lot of weird reasons. There was a time when I had a collection of Newsweek issues all way back from the Six-Day War in 1967 to the American invasion of Grenada, and various other cold war era issues, which I collected from my grandfather when I was helping him clean up in his study back when I was still a teen.
Newsweek says goodbye to print. #lastprintissue. Image courtesy of @Newsweek
For Newsweek, it will be business as usual as they will be concentrating their efforts on their online edition, to be called Newsweek Global, which as they published previously as what would be “a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context”. It makes perfect sense though to scrap the print edition as online appears to be more profitable mainly due to the worldwide trend of dwindling print advertising sales on major publications in the west. Newsweek’s online presence, which merged with The Daily Beast back in November 2010, now averages more than 15 million unique visitors month. You can just imagine the profitability of not having to think about production, circulation, archiving and physical storage requirements, all costs associated with running a print edition. Good for business, but definitely a sad day for print.