Newsweek Plans Makeover to Fit a Smaller Audience

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA Published: 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.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham, looking over prototypes for the redesign.

If a similar episode happens six months from now, editors say, Newsweek probably will not even bother.

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.