Newsweek's Redesign: An Exercise in Desperation

Newsweek's print subscribers (a shrinking group, that's for sure) noticed a change in the last two issues: the newsmagazine has overhauled its look, retitling its sections, changing its font, and relegating photos to horizontal header strips at the top of each page.

It's only one the last of a slew of publication redesigns in the last few years, as struggling newspapers and magazines try to convince readers (and more importantly, advertisers), that they are hipper and better and worthy of your money.

The fact that Newsweek has redesigned itself-and so drastically and desperately-bodes ill for the journalism industry.

The culprit, of course, is the Internet. News is now democratized, abundant (some may argue, overabundant), and more importantly, free. If you can get your news free online, why would you pay for a newspaper? And if no one's reading the newspapers, why would an advertiser buy ads?

The print journalism industry has been struggling to answer these questions ever since Web news took off. Newspapers and magazines have seen precipitous drops in subscription numbers and advertising revenue, and more than a few have tottered into extinction in the last year.

Newsweek, of course, isn't going anywhere for a while. It's still one of the biggest newsmagazines in the country.

However, its redesign shows that it, too, is struggling, and that's bad news bears.

The biggest complaint I've heard personally, is that the articles now look like ads. It's true. The article design has been so sleekified in an attempt to look cutting edge and hip, that the news is virtually indistinguishable from the ads.

The content (and more importantly, the spin) in the last two issues has also teetered closer to sensationalism than ever before. The main issue is the superfluous use of attention-grabbing pictures-a completely tabloid approach to selling news that I hadn't seen Newsweek resort to before with such fervor.

The first issue after the redesign featured an article about American misconceptions about Iran. While the article itself was well-reasoned and researched, the cover of the magazine bore a hideous close-up photo of Ahmadinejad grimacing. Necessary? No. Attention-grabbing in a National-Enquirer way? Heck, yes.

The second and most recent issue showcased an almost equally horrendous photo of Oprah, looking like a screaming nutcase. Inside, the feature section is headed by a full-page black and white photo of Oprah back in the day, as high school prom queen (if my memory serves me correctly). The problem is, the article has nothing to do with Oprah's youth. Nothing at all. The article is about questionable health claims made by "experts" on Oprah's show. To me, the only possible reason for running the prom queen photo was to show that Newsweek, like National Enquirer, was capable of digging up old photos of celebrities.

Now, I'll say right here that I'm a firm supporter of the journalism industry. Heck, I'm a journalist myself. For my own sake, I want the field to get back on its feet.

But it won't happen if the industry follows Newsweek's lead, and takes the new emphasis on features to mean sliding toward paparazzi-tabloid-ragdom.