Here’s Andrew Sullivan on the death of the print edition of Newsweek. Or, as I’ve spelled it for years, Newsweak. Because by the time it was in there, it was over.

Which, for me, raises the salient point: In print or in digital form, who needs Newsweek? It’s not just the format that is dying — and to which Sullivan says good riddance — it’s the underlying concept of a regularly issued magazine intended for cover-to-cover consumption. Sure, I still get The New Yorker, but I’m not reading it front to back. Why not? Because unlike during the heyday of magazines (and newspapers), there’s incredible competition for my time from other information sources — most notably the Internet. Here’s how I’ll read Newsweek onscreen: If I’m searching for something and it comes up, or if something from it comes across to me in another way (through social media, let’s say). Otherwise, I’ll be reading Newsweek online the way I’ve been reading Newsweek in print the past 20 years: not at all.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2012 at 8:16 am and is filed under On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.