WASHINGTON — U.S. News & World Report, long the number three newsmagazine in the United States behind Time and Newsweek, has become the latest U.S. media outlet to abandon print for the Web.
The move to become an Internet-focused publication was announced to U.S. 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," U.S. News president Bill Holiber and editor Brian Kelly said in the memo.
"For all of you who have worked so hard to make this transition possible, say good-bye to Web 2.0 and welcome to Journalism 5.0," they added.
Like other U.S. magazines and newspapers, U.S. 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 U.S. 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. U.S. News publishes popular annual rankings on such topics as America's "best colleges" and "best hospitals."
Earlier this year, U.S. News announced it was "moving away from a weekly magazine with a discrete Web site to become a multi-platform digital publisher of news you can use and analysis."
The shift to the Web by U.S. 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 U.S. newspaper to become entirely Web-based.
Copyright 2008 AFP
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