Word that Newsweek is discontinuing its print edition and going all-digital is stunning a lot of folks this morning. It shouldn't. It shouldn't surprise us when anything read on paper goes away these days. Yes, Newsweek once seemed like an ongoing force of nature. So did Life and Saturday Evening Post and Look and I can recall when TV Guide was the best-selling magazine in the history of mankind and most people couldn't exist without it.
Obviously, the Internet is a big reason for Newsweek's demise but those who think it's the sole reason are missing something. Disposable print media (newspapers, magazines) has been in a pretty steady decline in this country since…well, for magazines that didn't feature nude people, some time in the sixties. The Internet is a fairly recent factor. I noted in an article in 1980 that circulation of Playboy was in a slow but clear downslide and it wasn't because American males were losing their interest in seeing beautiful naked women. It wasn't even home video back then.
We simply don't want to read as much as we used to…and when we do, we want our reading targeted to specific topics of interest to us. We'll buy a book that focuses wholly on a particular subject but we don't have a whole lot of interest in a publication that contains diverse material. I can't fully explain this change but I'm convinced it has something to do with attention spans becoming shorter. When I've bought a magazine off the racks in the last decade or three, it's usually to read one specific article and I may not bother to do more than quickly scan the rest of the mag for other items of possible interest. This is in contrast to back in the sixties when I used to enjoy sitting down with the latest Esquire, starting at page one and seeing what they had for me that month. I only do that now with magazines when I'm in a waiting room and I neglected to bring along my iPad.
But I don't think the Internet, which seems to get most or all of the blame when a Newsweek goes away, is wholly or even largely to blame. I think it's the other way around: The Internet flourished because we were becoming less interested in reading words on paper, especially words that are not of immediate use and interest to us. It's a lot easier to do a global search of online articles to find the ones we care about than it is to browse the newsstand. Cheaper, too.