Ten days after its reported execution date, Newsweek’s website began redirecting to a vertical at The Daily Beast.
Now, upon landing, readers see a pop up featuring the much-used editor portrait of Tina Brown and a friendly message.
“Right now you’re visiting the new Newsweek channel of The Daily Beast. We hope you’ll feel right at home,” Ms. Brown says.
But on the back-end, according to one source familiar with the operations, it was actually The Daily Beast which switched over to Newsweek’s CMS, about three months ago. The Newsweek Daily Beast did not immediately return request for comment.
Gone with the URL are four mid-to-high level staffers. Former Newsweek special editions editorial director Jack Livings has become an international editor at Time, Inc., Newsweek.com executive producer Jon Groat now holds a similar title at Maxim, web developer Mark Catalano now develops Fast Company, and Brian Carney, former manager of sales development at Newsweek is now the same at Bloomberg Businessweek.
It wasn’t all loss this month. The Daily Beast Newsweek video department picked up senior coordinating producer David Wharton from ABC and hired marketing manager Ann Levin.
They also stole Martha Stewart Omnimedia’s Rosanne Lufrano, who will serve as digital vice president in charge of iPad app re-boot, according to Daily Intel.
“As you know ad pages in Newsweek are up 88% since Tina’s first redesigned issue appeared on newsstands in March,” spokesman Andrew Kirk added.
Follow Kat Stoeffel via RSS.
Subscribers in Massachusetts have been receiving their Newsweeks three days later than normal since the merger—a week AFTER they hit the newsstands. Imagine—four work days INTO the week! That’s stale news for sure…
The company has been alerted to the problem by many people and never responds. Customer Service recommends that we cancel—so we are!
A weekly news magazine that cannot or will not work with the Postal Service to fix this problem hurts itself as well as the Postal Service (which makes decent $ delivering magazines).
Tina Brown’s tacky and gratuitous covers of Diana and Palin—again—don’t help. The Daily Beast is doing well, but what the new company is doing to loyal subscribers of the magazine is unforgivable.
They are basically saying “screw you, subscribers.”Abandoning the online site is a shame, but at this point it is not surprising. Time will be the only winner here.
I subscribed to Newsweek for 40 years until their subscription price has doubled what it cost for Time. Why I don’t know. Don’t they make tons from their advertisers?