The Washington Post is putting Newsweek on the block. They can’t make it profitable.
Why would you or I get our news from an organization that is so incompetent they can’t understand why Newsweek is failing? For the same reason the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Phoenix Republic, the LA Times, the Boston Globe, and many other publications are failing.
I cancelled my long-term subscription to Newsweek 12 years ago. I even took time to write them a letter explaining my decision. Basically, I said I didn’t want to read a magazine that pandered to the left. Remember their recent cover story: We are all Socialists Now? Well, Newsweek, you were wrong again. Millions of Americans are not socialists and don’t want to read your socialist drivel.
Newsweek lost $30 million last year. The parent company believes it was primarily due to people getting their news from the Internet. They had Newsweek trying to tap the Internet market. It isn’t working.
Ratings continue to fall at MSNBC. Is that due to the Internet?
I had a marketing professor named Ted Levitt. Ted wrote Marketing Myopia. Ted contended the railroads didn’t know they were in the transportation business or they would have become the airlines.
Newsweek and their parent, the Washington Post, don’t realize they are in the journalism business. Since Watergate, they and their cousins believe they are in the power business. They see their job as the conduit to convey their ideology to the public. They really believe, and until recently, had ever reason to believe, they sold progressive liberalism to America. They got a president thrown out of office. After that, they believed they could do anything. They got an incompetent put into office. That was the big mistake. Since Obama’s coronation, the pubic has stopped listening. They have stopped buying their products and watching their propaganda.
Trying to carve a share of market from a shrinking market is tough. Since the public has branded the media, liberal progressive and non-liberal progressive, they chose to watch where they vote.
A student in Marketing 101 can tall the media what is happening to their business. But, they are like junkies on crack cocaine. They want to turn back the clock to the good old Watergate days. Or, to the “we can make America hate George W. Bush” or ” we can elect Obama” days. The last victory may be the last.
When the media thinks about doing a story like the one Newsweek did called, ” The Case for Killing Granny”, think twice. You may lose another few thousand viewers or subscribers, like Newsweek lost.
As smarter media marketers, maybe an oxymoron, see the segmentation of the media market, there will be a magazine that really brands itself like Newsweek should have done, just call yourself the Flaming Socialist. Be honest, why try to hide your purpose when we see through the ruse of cloaking yourselves as journalists. Just admit your purpose. People buy honesty.
Someone should buy Newsweek and re brand it Sleezeweek. It might sell.
