Newsweek (Finally) Wants to Embrace the Web -- But is it Too Late?

I can't sum up my feelings when I heard Jon Meacham tell Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, that Newsweek needs to "fully embrace the Internet." However I can describe my reactions: rolled my eyes, shook my head, and muttered, "about (effing) time." Really, I don't have anything against Jon Meacham, (and he is really smart) but I do have an issue with really smart people having had their head in the sand for the past 15 years, and not having "fully embraced" the Internet.

Stewart and Meacham hailed the importance of Journalism -- and lamented the subsequent lack of business model that supports the gathering of general news. Meacham "speculated" that Newsweek had it backwards -- where you are solely focused on the digital -- and then spin up a magazine! Yes!! Yes!! By gotcha he got it. Why this wasn't obvious 10 years ago, or even 3, when WaPo's management wrote this memo, outlining The 10 Web Principles, is beyond me.

Well, it isn't a mystery really. Writers have been skeptical of the Web for all the wrong reasons, putting more value in having something in print than in pixels. The reality is, and trust me, I have tested this on a whole bunch of journos and it is like light dawn's on marble head, news on the Web (and the corresponding byline) will be consumed by more people than in print. And for some reason that matters to journos - which is the reason you find Meacham on broadcast, writing books or even Twittering. They want their names out there; they want to know they are an influencer.

So while wanting to embrace the Web is a good thing albeit a bit overdue, sadly Meacham and Co will  find  that the work flow has been honed and hewn over the past 77 years to be a print-first paradigm -- and to shift Web-first is going to be ghastly difficult because the entire infrastructure needs to be ripped out. This is not an intractable situation -- but it is a problem, because it will require a capital budget expense -- which is hard to justify when the company is on the block.

I hope for the sake of investigative journalism, for balanced journalism, for war coverage and domestic issues coverage, Newsweek can sort it out. It's not too late yet, but it the clock is chiming.