U.S. News Re-invents the Wheel

(MoneyWatch)  The soft launch this week of U.S. News Weekly seems like a throwback to another era, and extremely unlikely to succeed. After all, it is once again an attempt to push a subscription model online, and plenty of other ships have already crashed on those shores.

This digital iteration of what used to be the weekly print magazine U.S. News & World Report (USN&WR) looks like a magazine but arrives as a downloadable PDF file. With a cover and table of contents, it resembles what in that other era (the mid-'90s) was uncharitably known as "shovel-ware."

The editor, Brian Kelly, says the focus of this publication will be inside-the-Beltway politics and policy. A one-year subscription will cost $19.95. I just don't get how this can possibly work. It's not like there's any type of exclusivity to the content -- everybody and her brother already cover national politics.

Hell, even the Obama administration's White House web page posts fresh content every day about policy initiatives, and is busy establishing a level of transparency that promises to flood the web with government documents that used to see the light of day only when unearthed by investigative reporters.

And then there's that "weekly" business. Kelly indicated the magazine will venture to "make sense" of the news, which is pretty much its only option, since there is no longer a weekly news cycle in our 24/7 world of continuous news updates.

The whole "back to the future" nature of this deal is perplexing. First, USN&WR reduced its publishing schedule from weekly to bimonthly, then it cut back gain to a monthly. Somewhere along the way, the magazine said it was exploring a digital-only option, so I guess we should have seen this coming.

But to hide this non-exclusive content behind a paywall? Unless I'm missing something here, this experiment will never make it from "soft" launch to "hard."