Newsweek By the Numbers

Journalism.org PEW reporting:
On Tuesday, May 28, Variety reported that IAC, Barry Diller's media and internet company, is considering selling Newsweek. It would be the magazine's second sale within a three-year period that included a merger with The Daily Beast and the decision to cease publishing a print edition. Editor-in-chief Tina Brown confirmed this in a memo on Wednesday, May 29. "Newsweek is a powerful brand," she wrote, "but its demands have taken attention away from The Daily Beast."
The news magazine genre in general has faced a difficult time transitioning to the digital space. But for Newsweek, the past few years have been especially tumultuous. Between 2007 and the end of 2009, when the magazine was still owned by the Washington Post Co., Newsweek reduced its total staff by 33%, according to Pew Research analysis of the magazines' staff boxes. Its revenues plummeted 38% in that three-year period, according to internal Newsweek documents. With these revenue declines, the magazine had an overall loss of $6 million in 2007 (before pension credits), which ballooned to $56 million in 2009. In August 2010, Newsweek was sold to audio industry businessman Sidney Harman for $1, plus the assumption of liabilities.
The losses continued after the sale. In 2010, Newsweek's internal documents projected a $22 million dollar overall loss for that year, less than half of what it had been the previous year. The next year, 2011, with the merger completed, IAC reported losses of nearly $14 million in its media group, which included Newsweek, The Daily Beast and several other websites.[1]
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The more niche oriented news magazines fared far better in the last decade, though their overall print audience has been smaller than both Time and Newsweek. The Atlantic and The Week grew the most, with the Atlantic enjoying a 4.7% rise in total circulation to 485,300 copies sold and The Week growing 4.4% to 551,658 copies. (For more read the State of the News Media 2013: News Magazines' Overall Circulation)
Though single-copy sales make up only a small portion of news magazines' overall circulation (just 3%, in Newsweek's case), this indicator is considered a more objective measure than subscriptions of a publication's health. Here, Newsweek's biggest plunge occurred from 2008 to 2010, falling 55%. Its single-copy sales fell just 5% in 2012, while other news magazines saw their single-copy sales plummet, including 27% at Time, 17% at The Economist and 18% at The Week. Newsweek's smaller decline, though, is quickly put in perspective. The magazine sold 57% fewer copies in 2012 than in 2007. (For more read the State of the News Media 2013: News Magazines' Single-Copy Sales)
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