Newsweek Plans Makeover to Fit a Smaller Audience

Newsweek is planning a redesign and some shifts in content to fashion an opinionated take on events, aimed at a much smaller, and wealthier, readership.

New York Times, February 8, 2009 — When US Airways Flight 1549 glided safely onto the Hudson River last month, Newsweek did what news organizations have done for more than a century — it sent reporters and photographers to the scene. Considerable effort yielded a modest article on Newsweek’s Web site, and nothing in the printed magazine.

Newsweek is about to begin a major change in its identity, with a new design, a much smaller and, it hopes, more affluent readership, and some shifts in content. The venerable newsweekly’s ingrained role of obligatory coverage of the week’s big events will be abandoned once and for all, executives say.

Facebook Aims to Extend Its Reach Across the Web

New York Times, December 1, 2008 — Facebook, the Internet’s largest social network, wants to let you take your friends with you as you travel the Web. But having been burned by privacy concerns in the last year, it plans to keep close tabs on those outings. Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites.