Unlike, say, AdWeek, which is no longer published weekly, the glorified college ranking magazine U.S. News & World Report does not carry the term “week” in its title. So when it goes from being a weekly to a biweekly next year, it’s going to be a less awkward public relations matter. Perhaps softening the blow, though, is that U.S. News was already cut from 46 to 36 issues last year.
But here’s the good news for Mort Zuckerman’s growingly irrelevant magazine: When ad revenue declines and cost pressures finally force competitor Newsweek to follow suit, as Michael Wolff predicted will happen within the next five years, well, they’re gonna have that whole “week” thing to deal with.
Mort Zuckerman’s U.S. News & World Report will slash its rate base from 2 million to 1.5 million, begging the question: Have you ever personally met any of the 1.5 million people supposedly reading U.S. News & World Report? [MP]
“I do read The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and, most critically, the Daily News. I read Time and Newsweek, and, of course, The Observer; and The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune and Vanity Fair.”
That’s Mort Zuckerman going on, and on, about the publications he reads. Perhaps only the staff at U.S. News & World Report – you know, that little magazine he owns – might have noticed he didn’t mention … U.S. News & World Report.
Sixty-one small relatively obscure American liberal arts colleges have reportedly opted out of U.S. News & World Review‘s annual rankings of higher education, in what Bloomberg News is calling “the biggest protest yet.”
Although, top-ranked schools (like Williams, Amherst and Swarthmore) have expressed “concern[s] about the survey’s fairness,” those concerns seem to be largely outweighed by the satisfaction of being rated the highest.
Meanwhile, those (safety!) schools joining the rebellion against U.S. News stand by their decision to boycott the “reputational survey,” explaining that they’d simply prefer to “sit around in patchouli oil-stained bohemian clothes, sipping green tea and eating organic ramen noodles out of dye-free handcrafted porcelain bowls while listening to Rufus Wainwright on their iPods or writing touchy-feely essays about ‘The Feminist Mystique’ instead.”
• Out in Redmond, MSNBC.com voices its approval of canceling Don Imus. They didn’t express their concerns to NBC News because, well, nobody cared.
• What’s worse: Images of Barbara Walters tanning, or images of Barbara Walters having sex?
• Fans of David Sedaris in the press corps rally behind the author’s lies.
• Bernard Goldberg’s tome on working at CBS News includes one, perhaps two, worthwhile anecdotes.
• After that little plagiarism scandal, CBS News says it’ll crack down on web content. Like, they’re start using links and stuff.
• With universities banning its survey, U.S. News & World Report finds itself suddenly irrelevant. Again.
• Arianna down! Arianna down!
One minute we hear the advertising industry is rebounding, the next we see the New York Times, Wired.com and just about every other media property is slashing their staff.
U.S. News & World Report didn’t want to be left out of the trend, sending nine employees (or is it 10?) into the firey furnace that is media unemployment.
While the Mort Zuckerman-owned newsweekly retains its grip on third place behind Time and Newsweek, the job cuts are in line with their strategy to put more effort into their website and, well, let the print edition grovel for scraps.
But we’re feeling most for Sara Sklaroff and Linda Kulman, two staffers who received their walking papers while on maternity leave. So while they’re struggling to support a growing family on a journalist’s salary, their belated baby shower gift of unemployment should go nicely with that Bugaboo.