Newsweek editor Tina Brown thought she had a surefire winner with her idea to place a picture of what she imagined the late Princess Diana would look like at age 50 next to an image of the Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton. But her idea bombed with both critics and advertisers.
According to MagazineRadar the issue managed to sell just 13.8 ad pages, making it the weakest issue for the struggling magazine since May 16 and well below the 24.5 average ad pages they had in June. To make matters worse, it was a double issue with just half the ads which equates to just under 7 ad pages for a regular issue.
Besides the lack of advertising, Brown and Newsweek took some hits from the media with the Los Angeles Times asking, “Shocking, brilliant or just plain cheap?,” and an Atlantic Wire headline adding, “How Creepy Is Princess Diana’s Ghost on the Cover of Newsweek?”
Maybe subscribers and newsstand readers will lap up the edition, but Brown should have known that it didn’t stand a ghost of a chance with most advertisers.
Don Irvine is the chairman of Accuracy in Media and its sister organization Accuracy in Academia. As the son of Reed Irvine, who launched AIM in 1969, he developed an understanding of media bias at an early age, and has been actively involved with AIM for over 30 years.
