COMM 150: Newsweek merger - convergence - FINAL EXAM CONTENT ADVISORY

Fallout from the planned merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek is, appropriately enough, concentrated in new media. Over the weekend, staffers in Newsweek's website - Newsweek.com - took to social media to state their worries about being laid off. And mostly it's web-based media that have covered it. Made to order for a final exam question about across-platform convergence of web-based and print media, huh? Just askin'. Or not.

a post by Joe Pompeno in a Yahoo! News blog called The Cutline.

On Friday afternoon, while the media world was buzzing about the freshly inked union between Newsweek and the Daily Beast, a handful of Newsweek.com staffers headed over to the Ear Inn, a watering hole in Manhattan's West Village, and started drinking. The mood was grim, an insider told us at the time, because the future of Newsweek.com suddenly seemed uncertain now that the famed magazine would be merging with Barry Diller and Tina Brown's 2-year-old Web news start-up.

Sure enough, staffers woke up Saturday morning to Daily Beast Publisher Stephen Colvin's confirmation that Newsweek.com would be getting the ax under the new joint venture (which makes Brown editor-in-chief of both publications). So they decided to state their case on Tumblr--the preferred outlet for Newsweek to respond to its detractors.


xxx Tumblr is a microblogging platform

... Newsweek's dot-com staffers have laid out a strong argument for why Newsweek.com should survive, touching on issues like search engine optimization, branding, existing partnerships--and, not least, its status as a consistently higher traffic draw than the Daily Beast.

"In the face of indifference, condescension and even outright hostility from its print counterpart; with little to no resources; with more high-level hires and fires over the past couple of years than anybody could possibly count—and a revolving door of editors—the small but tireless staff at Newsweek.com consistently created editorial work that made waves," reads the post.

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