Newsweek's Whitaker: Making News Cool

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, August 1, 2004

Byline: GEOFF LEWIS

Under Editor Mark Whitaker, Newsweek has made a strategic decision to aim its coverage at well-informed news consumers. The push to break news and "set the agenda" with lengthy analytical pieces put Newsweek in a position to excel in the news environment following Sept. 11. Newsweek not only won a 2002 National Magazine Award for its 9/11 coverage, it went on to win in 2004 for general excellence. This editorial strategy is definitely giving Newsweek a lift with more affluent readers. Folio: talked with Whitaker about Newsweek and his role as president of the American Society of Magazine Editors.

Folio: You talk a lot about setting the agenda by breaking stories or using distinctive analysis...

Whitaker: We made a strategic decision to serve the well-informed reader. But you have to give them something new, so that's why we try to break news and run very smart and sophisticated commentary to identify trends and set agendas before other people.

Folio: Do you think the general public understands that? This summer we have Michael Moore promoting Fahrenheit 9/11 by claiming that he is presenting the story of 9/11 and the Iraq war that the major media missed.

Whitaker: He's wrong. A lot of the focus of the 9/11 Commission was on the fact that the CIA had identified two of the hijackers as terrorists. They followed them to a meeting in Malaysia and then into the U.S. and dropped the ball and never told the FBI. Mike Isikoff broke that story in the summer of 2002. We had a lot of the original reporting about Saudi funding of terrorist organizations. The fact that funds that came from Prince Bandar's wife ended up in the bank account of the guy who was essentially the handler for two of the terrorists was another story that Isikoff and Mark Hasendall broke. So, these people who have the idea that the mainstream media hasn't broken these stories and hasn't been doing tough reporting just basically aren't reading us.

Folio: How is the hard news strategy helping the business of Newsweek ? Is it helping you attract younger readers?

Whitaker: That is a big priority for me. If you look at our numbers and Time's and U.S. News's, the average [age of readers] has drifted slowly upward. It is something you don't reverse overnight. I am encouraged, however. Every year I have lunch with our summer interns and say, "Be honest. Tell me what your friends think of Newsweek." Five years ago they said, "This is not a publication that our friends read. We feel like it's written for baby boomers." This year they said: "We think it's really cool."

Folio: Why?

Whitaker: They are reading for the hard news, which is interesting. But that's also a sign of the times. When I started this in the late 1990s, I don't think a lot of kids their age were paying attention to hard news. And now they are. We call Fareed Zakaria our foreign policy rock star, because he is incredibly hot with young people. Someone who is young, a person of color, a Muslim and who grew up in India has credibility with these kids that Tom Freidman, bless him, and some older columnists don't. He does a lot of speaking on college campuses and high schools and he's in incredible demand. The fact that there are events in the world that caused young people to say that we have to learn more about the rest of the world coincided with a change in our tone to edgier and more provocative. And I think it's been noticed.

Folio: Any changes in your readership profile as a result?

Whitaker: It hasn't shown up in the average age yet. The place where [the impact of the new strategy] has shown up is in the income and the education levels of our readers. The latest MRI numbers show a bigger gap among those kinds of readers over Time than has ever existed. There's a connection between that and the editorial strategy. [Time] also has problems maintaining what I think is an over-inflated rate base. We have a lot easier time maintaining a rate base of 3.1 million than 4 million. It's a rate base at which we can have a high quality profitable circulation without stretching and picking up marginal readers simply to bring in more ad dollars.

Folio: As president of ASME, what are your top priorities?

Whitaker: I don't think there's anything radically broken with ASME. The National Magazine Awards are healthy. We had a record turnout this year and people seem happy with that process. We've had good seminars and workshops for more experienced editors and younger people.

Folio: Are you concerned about continuing pressures on editors to make their magazines advertiser-friendly?

Whitaker: The other function that ASME has served is monitoring any violation, any kind of compromise in integrity, any breakdown in what has been thought of as the wall between church and state. We have to take a really fresh look at this. We have to be very vigilant about those issues, but frankly, we're living in a new world with advertisers looking for a different kind of relationship with new kinds of magazines.

Folio: Can you be more specific?