Newsweek Throwing In The Towel On Print, Will Be Going Digital Next Year

I can’t think of a time when Newsweek wasn’t in my life. I grew up in the easy depression that was the 1980′s Caribbean and moved to the easier depression of late 1980′s Flatbush. Walking down the seemingly chaotic Flatbush and Parkside intersection towards Ocean scared the shit out of me on a daily basis. The grime, the unceasing grey, the horns, everything put a damper on the thought that this was just a bad dream. That this was some scenario built out of nightmares, and tacky burnt orange carpeting, and depressed homeless folks taking protest shits on our welcome mats. Of course I turned to reading. It’s the cure for all that ails you, and I used to pick up the rolled Newsweek‘s that would scatter in the Brooklyn wind in and around Prospect Park. You’d see them caught in the innards of chain-link fences like they were placed there by the forgotten. Truly, Newsweek is how I learned to read (which I did very late). I’d stare at the words and they’d scream out to me in some imperceptible tongue. This was before I learned phonics or the meat and potatoes of language. But it was my blanket against a new world that I didn’t understand. It was a barrier to my alienation.

So you can imagine how much it saddens me to see Newsweek hang up the shingle of its print operation, seemingly, never to be heard from again. No one else will have the opportunity to experience what I did, or come to the conclusion that language thrown away is still current. Language is always current. I’m sure their EIC Tina Brown knows just that, and I’m sure that I’m over reacting just a little. It’s a dead medium anyway. All the readers have moved to the web or to mobile devices. Shit, I can’ t even think of the last time I physically was in front of a news-stand. But, it still strikes me as a blow to print media and publishing that stings particularly in some previous six year old self. She wrote, “We are announcing this morning an important development at Newsweek and The Daily Beast,” in A Turn of the Page for Newsweek. “Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the United States will be our Dec. 31 issue.” (Gawker)

There you have it. The Telegraph also reports that The Guardian is seriously considering canning their print editions as well, and I know that I’ve never read a guardian where I physically had to turn the page but that stings a bit too. Yes, something will rise up to replace them. Such is the movement of time. Yes. Yes. All of that, yes. Though, the Inter-webs aren’t as ubiquitous as you might think. We may just be setting ourselves up for some dystopian world where only people who have computers, or Kindle’s, or Nooks, or money can read the paper. I hope it never comes to that.