News You Can Lose: 'U.S. News' Cedes Weekly Turf

And then there were two.

It's been a long time since anyone thought of U.S. News & World Report as a true rival of Time and Newsweek, but now it's becoming official: The No. 3 newsweekly is ceasing to be a newsweekly at all, adopting a biweekly frequency for 2009, reports Ad Age. This change is less dramatic than it seems -- U.S. News had already scaled back from 46 to 36 issues -- but symbolically it's huge, marking the endpoint of the title's conversion from news magazine to service magazine with newsy trimmings. No wonder U.S. News president Bill Holiber says he's "less concerned about the broader issues" facing the newsweekly category.

(To the extent there is still a No. 3 newsweekly, it's now clearly The Economist, which differs from Time and Newsweek in several key regards -- it's far more business-driven and text-heavy, and not given to featurey cover packages on the true meaning of Christmas or what have you -- but it's at least about the news and a weekly.)

Foreseeable as it may have been, what makes U.S. News's abdication still slightly shocking is that, as recently as 1994, U.S. News not only competed ably with Time and Newsweek but bested them in ad pages, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. That state of affairs didn't last long, but it suggests how differently things could have turned out had Mort Zuckerman possessed the strategic vision to invest in his magazine or perhaps partner it with a cable network.