It’s possible that 91-year old Sidney Harman acquired Newsweek simply as a means of minimizing estate taxes for his family. But assuming he truly wants to turn Newsweek into a viable product in the coming years, what might he do?
Here are three steps he might take to make Newsweek viable.
Leverage the brand
This won’t be easy. Newsweek has very strong brand recognition, but that brand name is an anachronism in the age of real-time news.Perhaps the best thing he can do here is come up with a clever tagline. Maybe something like:
There are 604,800 seconds in every week. Newsweek covers each and every one of them.
Kill the print edition
This one is the most obvious, but will also be very difficult for many inside Newsweek to embrace.
But there is no better way to change the mindset of a newsweekly than to eliminate the weekly editorial and print schedule.
It may seem harsh to kill the print version and the many jobs that will go with it, but if he wants to save the brand, he will need to move swiftly in that direction.
Reconstitute themselves as the curator of choice for politics & policy
Rather than trying to author content on a vast number of topics, what if they instead set out to become the curator of choice for political and policy content? Don't try to comment on the news - instead, provide insights on key policy issues, both domestic and international.
Retain a few key editors, each of whom will be expected to write 1-2 blog posts each day. Then, using a combination of technology and lower-cost curators, sift through content from other media and blog sites, identifying relevant content and classifying it by topic. The end result will be a series of high quality pages on compelling topics, led by a modest amount of proprietary blog content surrounded by carefully curated web content. Some topics may be evergreen, while others may be cyclical (elections) or event-driven (e.g. WikiLeaks). The content should be multimedia in nature and should aim to provoke and promote discussion.
I would trash the existing Newsweek.com site and come up with a dual strategy for website and mobile. They should take a look at what Flipboard and Pulse have done on the iPad for inspiration. Everything should be based on easily browsing and sharing content.
That’s what I would do with Newsweek. What would you do?
