The Week. Read all about it!
Just over a year ago, the magazine world was abuzz with the news that the giant International Data Group was abandoning print. "Going forward IDG Communications will define itself as a web centric information company," is how Colin Crawford put it. A fortnight ago, the New York Times revisited the story and found that IDG was very pleased with its decision. Which makes Bill Falk all the more interesting. Falk is editor-in-chief of The Week, which promises to "tell you all you need to know about everything that matters", and he's grown the magazine's circulation to 500,000 subscribers in six years. Here, he tells reason.tv's Nick Gillespie why he's succeeding where others are failing.
"Dinosaurs" such as Time and Newsweek are "clearly in a bad place" says Falk because they think people want to read about, well, dinosaurs again and again and again. They don't. In a world where newspapers are too slow and magazines too bulky, The Week has discovered that readers (half a million of them) are willing to pay for a crisp bulletin of news and opinion that's witty and wide-ranging. There can be no comparison with IDG, of course, which is a specialist publisher, but Falk shows that there's a market for print — if those producing print understand that we're living in the 21st century. Meanwhile, IDG, which understands our times very well, is already planning for the transition to the next mass market — mobile.
