Iconic print magazine to abandon print for Web

WASHINGTON: US News & World Report, long the number three newsmagazine in the United States behind Time and Newsweek, has become the latest US media outlet to abandon print for the Web. The move to become an Internet-focused publication was announced to US News employees in a memorandum on Tuesday from management of the magazine.

“We’re accelerating this transformation in response to our rapid growth online where our audience is now about 7 million uniques a month and growing,” US News president Bill Holiber and editor Brian Kelly said in the memo. Like other US magazines and newspapers, US News has been losing readership and advertising revenue to online media for years.

The memo did not mention specific plans for the print edition, which has already gone this year from a weekly to a biweekly format, but The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that US News would now only publish once a month.

The Post added that the monthly print edition would also be entirely devoted to consumer guides and not news. US News publishes popular annual rankings on such topics as America’s “best colleges” and “best hospitals.”

The shift to the Web by US News comes just a week after the 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor announced plans to end its daily print edition and become the first national US newspaper to become entirely Web-based.