Newsweek kills Print Edition - one of biggest to fall

A few weeks ago, my classmate Michelle posted on this blog about the transition of print to digital for many publications.  Now, this week, Newsweek made the announcement, a large one for the publishing world, that it will cease to produce it's print edition starting in January of 2013 and will instead be called Newsweek Global which will be a digital edition published to the web, e-readers, tablets, and other devices. 

http://adage.com/article/media/newsweek-end-print-edition/237833/
http://adage.com/article/digital/newsweek-ceo-dumping-print-liberates/237856/

Given I currently work in the publishing industry at Time Inc, this announcement was both not surprising, yet surprising at the same time.  I knew this was the likely the direction that many print magazines might take and the news weeklies have been struggling with staying timely and current ever since news stories began breaking on the internet (this is something similar that my brand deals with in the sports world, but our editors have sought to make the print publication different than the latest scores/schedules info you can get online by publishing more investigative or long form, non-timely stories in the print pub), but I am surprised that it is cutting it completely and so soon.  On the one hand, a print publication is a costly venture between the rising paper, production, and shipping/mailing costs.  On the other hand, print ad pages are generally much more profitable than digital ads as there is a premium that comes with reaching the larger audiences that print has built up over the years, whereas Tablet audiences are still in their growth stages.  Many titles at Time Inc. are starting to report their tablet edition numbers to the ABC Pink Sheet, but most are not yet counting those numbers towards the promised rate base number given to advertisers.  It will be interesting to see how Newsweek does in the future with dropping the print/production costs (and a lot of staffing costs), but also losing the profitable ad revenue that comes with a print publication.  I wonder if the digital alone can sustain itself for Newsweek or if this is the beginning of that brand folding completely.  Time will tell...