Newsweek to cease print edition in Dec

Newsweek announced yesterday it would end an 80-year run as a print magazine at the end of the year, taking the venerable publication all-digital to cope with a harsh media environment.
"We are transitioning Newsweek, not saying goodbye to it," wrote Tina Brown, editor-in-chief and founder of the online Newsweek Daily Beast Company, in a statement posted on the Daily Beast website.
"This decision is not about the quality of the brand or the journalism -- that is as powerful as ever. It is about the challenging economics of print publishing and distribution."
Newsweek, which had a fierce decades-long rivalry with Time magazine, has been losing money steadily.
Brown acknowledged the merger of the print edition and the online Daily Beast operations, called "Newsweek Global," would require layoffs.
It will be available on the web and on tablets via a paid subscription, with "select content" available on The Daily Beast website.
The company operating the magazine had indicated in July the move to all-digital was likely.
Like other US magazines and newspapers, Newsweek has been grappling with a steep drop in print advertising revenue, steadily declining circulation and the migration of readers to free news online. Circulation has fallen from more than four million a decade ago to around 1.5 million last year.