Newsweek Magazine to Go Online Only?

During a conference call today to discuss IACInteractiveCorp’s (NASDAQ: IACI) second-quarter earnings, the company’s chairman was asked whether the company would continue to publish a hard-copy edition of Newsweek magazine, a publication that IAC now controls. Bloomberg cites Chairman Barry Diller’s answer:

The transition to online from hard print will take place,” Diller said. “We’re examining all of our options.

Forbes added this to Diller’s remarks:

Our investment next year is going to be significantly less than it is this year.

And the AllThingsD blog reports:

Our plan is that, by September, October and certainly, uh, firmly have a plan in place for next year. It’s going be different than it is this year. I can’t tell you in what ways it’s going to be different. But it will be different.

Newsweek is believed to be losing about $30 million a year and Diller also noted the costs associated with printing what came to be called the ‘dead-tree’ version of a periodical. Any interpretation of Diller’s remarks as somehow leaving an opening for continued weekly print publication is probably wishful thinking. An occasional publication directed at a targeted audience may survive, much like US News & World Report’s college rankings.

The obvious question, of course, is how long Time Warner Inc.’s (NYSE: TWX) Time magazine will last. It appears to be the last man standing in the formerly populated field of weekly news magazines. The odds are that general news magazines will follow compact discs down the memory hole.

Paul Ausick