Technology, Magazines | featured news

Technologies that target ads to specific consumers, rather than aggregate audiences offered by publishers, are punishing newspaper, broadcast and magazine sites.

Newsweek will end its print publication after 80 years and shift to an all-digital format in early 2013. Its last U.S. print edition will be its Dec. 31 issue. The paper version of Newsweek is the latest casualty of a changing world where readers get more of their information from websites, tablets and smartphones. It's also an environment in which advertisers are looking for less expensive alternatives online.

Chris Hughes’s first business venture worked out nicely. As a teenager, he helped start something called Facebook. Within four years, working mostly part-time, Hughes vaulted into the ranks of the stratospherically wealthy. He wasn’t quite 23 years old.

Parent company Conde Nast may still think the web is not that important, but The New Yorker does. The 87-year-old magazine decided to make a “big investment” in its website six to eight months ago, Nicholas Thompson, editor of newyorker.com, says. The web team was expanded to 12 full-time employees, including Thompson, who was named editor in March after working “on the magazine side” as a senior features editor for two years. Editor-in-chief David Remnick thought he would be a good fit for the website in part because he had a background in technology coverage, having spent five years as a senior editor at Wired, Thompson says.

Apple appears to have reversed its guidelines for magazine and newspaper subscriptions purchased in its App Store, in a big victory for publishers who blanched at the original terms.

GIGAOM's Darrell Etherington makes some good, if obvious, points about how magazine publishers.