call it the crib sheet for inside the Beltway.Newsweek got perhaps the ultimate sanction last summer as legislators set out to get to the bottom of intelligence failures that led to 9/11. Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland gave her imprimatur to the newsweekly’s illuminating, ahead-of-the-pack reportage on the subject at hand by telling fellow members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: “In all my intel reading over the weekend, I thought to myself: Why be on the committee? All I need is a subscription to Newsweek.”
In a world of 24-hour news, one could be forgiven for seeing the newsweeklies as long past their prime, as having lost their relevance. But even as news-oriented weeklies jockey for position against dailies, cable and the Internet—and with ever-multiplying numbers of celebrity weeklies, shopping guides and other niche titles drawing so much attention—the Washington Post Co.’s venerable Newsweek has bucked the “conventional wisdom” and generated major buzz—even in Congress.
The magazine’s stronger-than-ever journalistic outturn; fresh, unpredictable take on subjects already covered by a zillion other press outlets; numerous industry honors; innovative cross-media partnerships and spinoffs; and steady advertising growth all inspired Adweek Magazines to honor Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker and executive vp/worldwide publisher Greg Osberg as this year’s Executive Magazine Team of the Year.
This “team” was singled out with the understanding that Whitaker and Osberg have very different—and separate—roles at Newsweek. The wall separating news and sales at this upright, hard-news outfit is an impenetrable one. But the two sides can and do cooperate. Newsweek appears to be a place where everyone knows they’re working for the common good, where the turf battles so common at larger, multimedia conglomerates seem less of an issue.
“Throughout the organization, everyone understands that we’re in this together, and that in order to be the kind of influential, exciting, important publication that we all want Newsweek to be…it has to be a successful business enterprise,” says Rick Smith, Newsweek’s chairman and editor in chief, to whom both Whitaker and Osberg report. “The church-state barrier still very much exists at Newsweek—but there are portholes from one side to the other so you can see what the other guys are doing.”
Mark Edmiston, managing director of the M&A firm AdMedia Partners and the CEO of Newsweek from 1981 to 1986, says there had to be some degree of cooperation between the top news and business-side ranks for the magazine to have reinvented itself so effectively in the last decade or so, as the whole category has had to reinvent itself. “That, clearly, is where the teamwork came together,” Edmiston says. “Time after time, the integrity of the editorial product has been maintained. The troops are not going to get rolled over by some guy out there with a good suit on. There’s a comfort level there.”
“The newsweeklies a decade or so ago were at a crossroads, but they have evolved, and what [Whitaker] has done is a good example of that—offering a very passionate, articulate, contemporary take on the news,” says Paul
Woolmington, CEO of media-planning firm The Media Kitchen. “When he got hold of the magazine, he did an excellent job of evolving it into something that is more of a must-read.” The job of newsweekly editor used to be that of an “oracle, these very revered positions,” Wool– mington says. But Whitaker is “more commercially minded—he’s a very adaptable person. If it ain’t working, he’s going to change it. It’s not, ‘If we’ve done it for 50 years, we’re going to keep it going.’ That was one of the legacies of the past.” Under Whitaker, Newsweek has become an environment that’s “more reader-friendly, a bit more relaxed, and less stuffy,” Woolmington says.
Linda Thomas Brooks, executive vp, managing director of General Motors Mediaworks, seconds: “Newsweek has done a really good job of doing consumer research to find out what the marketplace wants—they’re data- driven, not ego-driven. And Greg is always figuring out a way for us to do business together.” When asked whether Newsweek—boasting a readership of more than 20 million each week—wasn’t a “must-buy” for the automaker, Brooks shoots back: “There are no must-buys anymore—just as for the consumer, there’s no must-read anymore. But [Whitaker and Osberg] have figured out how to stay relevant from the consumer standpoint and from the advertiser standpoint.”
Under the much-admired guidance of Whitaker for the last six years, the 3.1 million-circ Newsweek has scooped up three coveted National Magazine Awards—for General Excellence in 2004 and 2002, and in the Reporting category in 1999. Last year, the title was honored for its impressive, exhaustive coverage of the Iraq war, beating out archrival Time. Raising the profile of the magazine even more, Whitaker last year became president of the American Society of Magazine Editors.
In an age of shortened attention spans—and, hence, shorter magazine articles—Newsweek last November served up the definitive election postmortem with its 46,000-word, behind-the-scenes special report from the campaign trail. A team of reporters and editors working exclusively on the postelection issue spent a year—and seven figures—tailing camps Bush and Kerry. To compete with Time’s famed Person of the Year year-end issue—one of the most successful magazine franchises ever—Newsweek four years ago created its Who’s Next issue. This year, that issue scored a record number of ad pages.
Newsweek and its peers have had to retool themselves to keep readers interested. Clearly, there’s more work ahead. In the most recent Audit Bureau of Circulations report, for the six months ended Dec. 31, 2004, Newsweek’s slight year-over-year gain in subscription sales was met by a 5 percent decline at the newsstand (the magazine sells 20 times more subscriptions than it does newsstand copies; same goes for the competition). The much larger, 4 million-circ Time slid 2 percent in overall circ, as a near–5 percent gain in single-copy sales could not offset a 2 percent slip in subs. The 2 million–circ U.S. News & World Report was flat all around.
For years, much has been made of the Time-Newsweek horse race. But how much do the Newsweek troops really worry about what’s going on across the street—literally, now that Time Warner has erected its towering glass headquarters just across Manhattan’s Columbus Circle from Newsweek’s offices? “Competitively, we obviously are at a huge disadvantage—we’re up against a huge empire,” Whitaker says. “But the advantage we think we have working for this company—family-run and with a deep tradition of editorial independence and quality—is that we can be very nimble in trying new things.”
Though some might see the newsmagazines as relics, Whitaker contends that Newsweek still holds a unique role in the media mix. “We don’t kid ourselves that we’re one-stop shopping, that you come to our magazine and don’t need any other media,” he says. “I don’t think serious consumers of the news look at it that way.”
The editor wants to make his mark in all the diverse areas the magazine covers—whether Iraq or Washington, Wall Street or Hollywood. Whether covering Ahmad Chalabi (whom Newsweek pegged as “Our Con Man in Iraq”) or late-night gabber Jon Stewart, the magazine always seems to have its finger on the pulse. “My idea of an iconic Newsweek story is one that will be accessible to a general reader but also really smart to an expert reader,” Whitaker explains. The editor is also quick to own up to a mistake. A recent dustup over a cover shot that put Martha Stewart’s head on a model’s body—which Whitaker later called “just dumb and badly executed”—resulted in a new policy of putting photo credits on the cover, a first for a newsmagazine.
One of Whitaker’s greatest achievements is the all-star roster of journalists he’s assembled, some whose faces —thanks to their frequent appearances on MSNBC, CNN, the Sunday-morning talk shows and elsewhere—have become as familiar as their names. And they’re only getting more exposure. Last month, it was announced that one of the magazine’s “rock stars,” columnist Fareed Zakaria, will host an international-affairs series on PBS stations. Other Newsweek scribes who have become household names include George Will, Anna Quindlen, Howard Fineman, Eleanor Clift, Andy Borowitz, Jonathan Alter, Evan Thomas, David Ansen and Michael Isikoff.
Much of that talent has filled Newsweek’s pages for decades. In fact, it’s hard to find a magazine with a masthead of talent as entrenched as Newsweek’s. And nobody is more established than Whitaker, who joined the magazine in 1977 as a reporting intern while still a student at Harvard—and who has been there ever since, steadily working his way to the top after stints in Boston, Washington, London and dispatches dotting the globe. This, after a peripatetic life as the son of academics, which took him from the East Coast to the West Coast to the French countryside.
The stability of Newsweek’s ranks, and the family atmosphere the magazine has long nurtured, are among its greatest strengths, says Washington Post Co. chairman/CEO Donald Graham. “It is unusual and invaluable to have people who know the magazine so well,” says Graham, the son of legendary Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham for whom this publishing enterprise always has been a family affair. “Newsweek’s key people go back a long way together—they’ve torn up a million covers together [when news breaks], and they absolutely know when a news event happens how to cover it in the best possible way.”
Smith says that in every job Whitaker has taken over the years, he “exceeded expectations,” even when a particular role might not seem a natural fit. When Whitaker was appointed business editor, some scratched their heads, since his background was in international reporting. “You learn to swim by swimming, and with each new assignment, Mark, whether in familiar waters or not, proved to be a hell of a swimmer,” Smith says.
Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter—a Harvard classmate of Whitaker’s and fellow Harvard Crimson alum—says his old friend, who graduated summa cum laude in 1979, really is as smart as you think. Alter remembers a particular physics course that proved too tough for him, so he dropped out—only to find that Whitaker so aced the class that he was asked to be the teacher’s assistant. “I think there’s a suspiciousness about intellectuals in this country,” Alter says. “But sometimes, brains wins.”
For his part, Osberg has worked for Newsweek since 1990, save for a three-year stint at the tech company CNET as president of sales and marketing. Smith calls this Osberg’s “time in the wilderness” but adds that it made him an even stronger publisher, as the Internet has become an increasingly important part of Newsweek’s editorial mission and its ad-sales strategy.
In fact, there is a perception that during Osberg’s absence, Newsweek suffered, losing some of its competitive edge against the dominant Time. “He came back even stronger than ever,” Smith says. “I knew we wanted him back—and needed him back.” When Osberg returned, in October 2000, Graham was one of the many who welcomed him back. “I’ve known many great advertising and marketing executives, and Greg is absolutely one of the best I’ve ever seen,” he says.
Newsweek last year enjoyed 6.8 percent growth in advertising pages, the third year in a row the magazine boasted gains. Bolstering business in ’04 were big commitments from Chrysler, which bought six double gatefolds around Newsweek’s election coverage, and McDonald’s, for which the team created a series of advertorials around the anniversary of the Ronald McDonald House charities. Strong categories include automotive, financial, technology and media/entertainment, reports Osberg.
While Time outsold Newsweek last year by about 400 pages and its year-over-year ad-page growth of 10.3 percent outpaced Newsweek, Osberg points out that the No. 1 advertiser in Time is…Time Inc. Echoing Whitaker, he says: “We couldn’t compete on their playing field—they’re the world’s largest media company.”
Instead, Osberg says, he and his team built alliances with the likes of MSNBC—which, on a daily basis, features Newsweek staffers and their work on its cable programs and Web site—and international publishing partners which last year launched editions of Newsweek in Russian, Chinese and French, bringing to seven the number of local-language editions of the magazine. In the U.S., Newsweek launched two titles: the student-produced college newsmagazine Currents and the shopping title Tip, a spinoff of the magazine’s Tip Sheet column.
Smith says since he came to Newsweek 35 years ago, people have asked him about the role of the newsweekly. A quarter-century after the Columbia Journalism Review depicted Time and Newsweek as cartoon dinosaurs, the genre’s obit continues to get written—then filed away as it bucks expectations and adapts to each new medium threatening to kill it off. “The extraordinary proliferation of news and information outlets works in our favor—the blizzard of snippet quotes and video clips and screaming headlines and screaming pundits makes our role in the lives of our readers even more important,” Smith insists. “I think Mark understands that down to his fingertips, and Greg understands the power of that idea as a selling tool. These are very smart guys.”
Tony Case is a contributing writer for Mediaweek.
Weekly Warriors
