Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff: "If Newsweek Is Around In Five Years, I'll Buy You Dinner"

Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff said today he'd be surprised if newsmagazines like Newsweek survive the next half-decade, given how much the print media have been squeezed by the shift of readers to online.

"We're looking at our own obsolescence," he told his fellow panelists at an I Want Media forum on "The Future of Media" held as part of the first ever Internet Week in New York City. "If Newsweek is around in five years, I'll buy you dinner."

"The days of 'Extra! Extra! Read All About it!' are gone and never coming back," said New York Post media reporter Keith Kelly. Newspapers, he added, have to "reevaluate how they do news."

Because stories like the Eliot Spitzer scandal are increasingly being broken online, newspapers have started encroaching on the traditional space of weeklies.

"On a daily basis we're trying to put out a newsmagazine like you guys did 20 years ago," New York Times media columnist David Carr said to Newsweek senior writer Johnnie L. Roberts.

The advertising base for the ink-and-paper media has rapidly shrunk in the past couple of years, as more readers opt to get their news from online aggregators like Google and annotators like Newser (which was founded by Wolff). The sources of the original reporting have begun suffer.

"This is good for nobody, except maybe the consumer who gets a lot for free," said Wolff. "It has no economic model, and nobody really gets paid for it."

Erick Schonfeld, who made the switch from print to blogging last year when he left Business 2.0 to help run TechCrunch, revealed his own ambivalence about aggregators like Google. The search engine can sometimes help bloggers by bringing them a wider audience, but it can also undermine them from profiting off their labor. He called Google his "frenemy."

Likewise, Roberts noted that bloggers can often draw more attention to a print story by linking to it, even though they also often set the agenda. "Blogs are like megaphones," he said.

Whether or not the print media will be able to adapt to the changing media landscape, there's no question that news has become one of the main uses for the web.

"Nothing beats it," said Carr. "Maybe porn. But not by much."

Comments

[sammy333]

The same fate awaits Time, Vanity Fair, NYT (who needs Kristol's lies, anyway). It will be replaced by free internet Media. Saves trees and brain cells.

[CARTERJ]

The magazine has been in such decline for years; too many cover stories on religion and trends, not nearly enough news. When they hired Karl Rove as 'contributor', they lost me. As soon as I heard of this, I cancelled my long-time subscription. I go online to get CW.

[GallopingCat]

One thing that is not like news is making inane predictions or expressing ridiculous opinions, like David Brooks just did. The advantage of a weekly magazine like Newsweek, if they choose to do so, is to step back from the "report the news now to get it out there even if it's just a rumor" crowd, or to go in depth on an issue that tabloid journalism is avoiding. Wolff seems to think breaking news is everything, but we still have Richard Jewell moments.

Also, look the story the NYT broke about propaganda from retired generals. Traditional reporting can work. Even though Wolff has invested in traditional media dying, it's not the format that's the problem, as people have noted here, it's the actual news itself.

[apeweek]

The assumption is that readers prefer to read news for free on the internet. That's not true, at least for me. I would prefer to read convenient printed news, at the dinner table.

However, I have switched to getting my news online - but not because it's free.

I switched so that I could get accurate and fair news - something the MSM is not giving us.

How many in the MSM are even considering this possibility?

[LafnBacstage]

Hey! What am I supposed to read while on the can? I don't have internet in the bathroom yet.

[DevilAdvocate]

LOL that's funny so true...or in bed, when I want a nice book to read or mag... you still need it!!!

[larry278]

How about TIME? Will it go the way of LIFE? NEWSWEEK's publishers, to their credit, have avoided trying to publish LOOK since it folded in the 20th century. If anything of TIME-Warner survives-what will it be called besides bankrupt? AOL, Warner Cable & TIME aren't doing well. Since the collapse of the real estate bubble-credit has dried up. Nobody is going to buy any part of TIME Warner communications & screen door/awning unless they can float a leveraged deal.
Charging fees based on one's use of the web isn't being tolerated by the subscribers to whatever TIME Warner calls its isp's. When will it fold?
larry lynch

[InofTouch]

How many people keep saying that some object is dead only that it still around. Love these bold statements when there were new but now...there just like sports players stateing "Guarantee" for the win and how many of those always come true.

On the bright side Free Dinner.

[drblack]

The Corporate media could keep readers and viewers if it stopped being the Corporate media.
people are realizing they are being sold a bill of goods.
Hard core factual reporting that ONLY promotes the best interests of the American people has all but disappeared from corporate TV and print News.
Online news is much more like NEWS.

[Shaddup]

Bravo!