A key part of Christensen’s theory is that the incumbent players in a particular industry routinely fail to make the necessary changes to the way they do things, even when they can see the disruption occurring all around them. In almost every case, they see the disruptors as not worthy of their attention because they are operating at the low end of the market, and either don’t see that as important or are too committed to their existing business models.

Low-end competitors open up new markets

Existing players are often good at what the Harvard scholar calls “sustaining” innovation, but they are rarely good at disruptive innovation. The latter is the kind that transforms something that used to be complicated and expensive — and therefore available only to the wealthy or those with special skills — and makes it available to a much broader group of users.

So in telecom, he said, existing companies didn’t see the potential disruption from cheap flip-phones and ubiquitous cellular networks because they were too focused on large corporate customers, not individual users, and their businesses weren’t set up to take advantage of this new market:

“The flip-phone and wireless made it so affordable and accessible that people around the world could now have access to telecommunications, and in almost every part of the world, the people who were the pioneers were not the existing wire-line players because it didn’t fit their business models… I think you see this playing out in journalism too.”

Value is created in new places

Although Christensen didn’t mention them by name, the obvious low-end competitors in the media business are players like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed — both of which started at the low end of the value chain but have been moving up steadily, a trend that Christensen’s theory also describes. The Harvard professor also made some positive comments about Forbes magazine, and what it has been able to do online compared with other traditional magazines such as Fortune and Newsweek.

“Compare, for example, Newsweek and Fortune on one side against Forbes on the next — the core business just got killed. McGraw-Hill sold Newsweek to Bloomberg for a dollar… but with Forbes, while the traditional magazine got commoditized, they’ve created different business models above and below that are really kind of interesting.”

(Note: Professor Christensen appears to be confusing Newsweek and BusinessWeek here — Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek, while Newsweek was sold for a dollar to the financier behind The Daily Beast).

The Forbes example reinforces another key point in Christensen’s description of disruption: as one layer of what technologists call “the stack” of processes that make up a business becomes commoditized, it creates value in other layers that can be captured by new players. So in journalism, Christensen says, the job of accumulating and distributing information about the world — something newspapers like the New York Times used to have a monopoly on — has become commoditized:

“As disruption occurs, it commoditizes a layer in the stack, so what used to be a high value-added activity that was very profitable and others couldn’t replicate, now becomes cheap and easy and anyone can do it. It used to be that news and information was one of those layers in the stack — no one could play that game like the New York Times… but now everyone has access to more information than they could possibly use.”

Find other jobs that news consumers want done

The key to managing that disruption, Christensen says, is to find those other value-added businesses or markets or functions — “jobs to be done,” as he calls them — that news or journalism consumers are looking for. One example, he suggests, might be taking in all of the information people are deluged by and telling them what is true and what isn’t (something mainstream media outlets often fail to do, as I tried to describe in a recent post):

“Are there jobs for which there have not yet emerged viable competitors? I’m awash in information, but I need someone who will tell me what is true, and it’s not clear that anyone has really done that job yet — the New York Times thinks they’ve nailed that, but it’s not clear to me that they have.”

Christensen also warned — as he has in the past, including in the report that he co-wrote last fall with Nieman Fellow David Skok, entitled “Breaking News” — that many existing players in the media business are trying to innovate within their traditional corporate structure, and that this almost always fails. In answer to a question about the Boston Globe, he said the approach of having a separate site called Boston.com run by a separate team was smart.

When an audience member said the site was now being run from within the Globe newsroom, however, Christensen changed his mind, saying: “Oh my gosh, really? Then put on your helmet, because it will force Boston.com to conform itself to the newsroom. That’s the way it always works, Sorry about that.” The full audio stream of the interview is available at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Rumors of widespread staff reductions at the publishing conglomerate have been floating around in media circles for several days, with some estimates of the cuts running as high as 700 people. According to a number of reports, the layoffs will hit virtually every aspect of the company, including most of its 21 magazine titles such as People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated.

At the eponymous magazine that started the empire, Time editor Rick Stengel said he was looking for half a dozen staffers to take a voluntary buyout, and if that number isn’t reached by Feb. 13, there will be mandatory layoffs. People magazine, one of the company’s top titles in terms of subscribers, said that it was looking for nine people to take voluntary buyouts — three writers and six reporters or researchers — or there will be layoffs.

Lang says Time needs to be more nimble

The bleeding is apparently so bad at the media giant that there was even a report from Reuters that Time may sell its iconic headquarters in New York City. Lang said in her memo that the cuts were required in order to transform Time into a more nimble, multi-platform company:

“With the significant and ongoing changes in our industry, we must continue to transform our company into one that is leaner, more nimble and more innately multi-platform. These reductions are part of this important transformation process.”

The broader story at Time is the same as it is at newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post: print advertising revenue, which has been the company’s bread-and-butter for decades, is in free fall — and digital advertising and online revenue have not even come close to making up the difference. In the nine months ended in September, revenues at Time fell by 6 percent, and operating profit dropped a whopping 38 percent.

Since Lang arrived as CEO a year ago, the former ad agency executive has made a number of moves to try and boost Time’s digital revenues, including a deal with Apple to sell subscriptions through the company’s iOS Newsstand app. But the benefits of such arrangements — whatever they may be — don’t seem to be enough to stem the ongoing damage.

When his main competitor Newsweek announced that it was shutting down its print edition after a merger with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast online venture, Stengel said that Time magazine had “done very well and we’ll continue to do well.” But given what we’ve seen at other media entities, these cuts are unlikely to be the end of the pain for Time Inc.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock / Aperture 51

As my GigaOM colleague Laura Owen notes in her post on the announcement, Sullivan has been hosting an ongoing discussion on his blog about the changing economics of content, including the influence of tablets and the decline of traditional models based on advertising revenue (we are going to be talking with Sullivan about these and other topics — including his latest move — at our paidContent Live media conference in New York on April 17). And his former employer has been a perfect symbol of the kind of destruction these forces can create, having just shut down Newsweek magazine, which the Beast merged with two years ago.

In his blog post announcing the move, Sullivan makes it clear that his decision is about more than just his own welfare: he said he is trying to prove that a new-media model based on direct reader funding — something he tried for several years before allying himself with Time and then The Atlantic — can work for others as well:

“If this model works, we’ll have proof of principle that a small group of writers and editors can be paid directly by readers, and that an independent site, if tended to diligently, can grow an audience large enough to sustain it indefinitely.”

Can Sullivan survive on reader subscriptions alone?

In a sense, this is the same kind of transition the New York Times and other media entities are trying to engineer, where reader subscriptions become the primary method of monetization rather than advertising. But while the NYT has been having some success in that department, the jury is still out on whether that model will work for others — or whether, as the authors of the recent Tow Center report on “post-industrial journalism” argued, the Times is such a unique proposition that it can’t be imitated by more than a select few (and at least one observer has said that Sullivan himself is the blogging equivalent of this problem).

The state of journalism as described by the Tow authors — media theorist Clay Shirky, journalism professor Chris Anderson and Tow Center head Emily Bell — is a landscape where the major media entities in virtually every field are being disrupted and unbundled, and where smaller players targeted at specific niches stand the best odds of success. It’s an almost Darwinian view of the industry, with slow-moving giants who are gradually replaced by more nimble and flexible species. And it’s also a more personal and human-sized approach, one that Sullivan clearly sympathizes with:

“We believe in a bottom-up Internet, which allows a thousand flowers to bloom, rather than a corporate-dominated web where the promise of a free space becomes co-opted by large and powerful institutions and intrusive advertising algorithms.”

The model Sullivan is banking on — which features a $19.99-per-year subscription, free incoming links from blogs and social media, as well as a “pay whatever you want” donation option — is similar in many ways to the freemium or membership models other sites have staked their future on, including Mike Masnick’s tech-opinion and analysis site Techdirt and Josh Marshall’s political news and opinion network Talking Points Memo. But while those sites are offering extra features for members (such as member-only discussion forums and access to extra content, etc.) Sullivan says non-paying readers who merely follow links to his content will get exactly the same thing paying readers do.

Do paywalls work better when they are for individuals?

In other words, Sullivan is betting that his personal brand and goodwill with his readers is enough to convince a substantial proportion of them to fund his writing — a more sophisticated version of the “tip jar” model. And within minutes of his announcement, dozens of prominent Twitter users and other Sullivan fans had announced that they had already signed up. As Laura Owen notes in her post, this could have a potential impact on The Daily Beast’s attempts to launch its own subscription model: what proportion of its readers would rather donate directly to support an individual writer, rather than have a blanket paywall around all the magazine’s content?

In a sense, Sullivan’s approach — if it works — poses a potential threat to traditional media entities that have built their businesses on strong personal brands: there has already been speculation that statistics superstar Nate Silver of the 538 blog might quit the New York Times to go it alone, and other name-brands at that newspaper and others might decide to take a similar route. Just as a growing number of authors have been cutting out the middleman by self-publishing their books, a membership model could mean independence for columnists who have traditionally been shackled to a large media entity (although some skeptics believe Sullivan’s move is more about self-interest than about a principle).

Even that model contains its own problems, however. How many individually paywalled or subscription-based sites will readers want to sign up for? Every Sullivan-like success story could make it increasingly difficult for others to follow in his footsteps. But for now at least, the Daily Dish blogger’s move is a very prominent thumb in the eye for traditional media players — and a flag of hope for every writer who has dreamed of building his own mini media empire.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/Africa Studio and Flickr user jphilipg

One of the classic lessons from Christensen’s seminal book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is that companies with a commanding lead in their field, whether it’s hard-drive makers or steel mills, are almost incapable of taking the steps that need to be taken to survive a technological and/or behavioral disruption — even when the danger of not doing so is blindingly obvious. In other words, even when a company can see quite clearly that a freight train is approaching or a cliff lies directly ahead, it is still almost impossible to step off the tracks or do anything other than stampede over the edge.

Newspapers were doing well, until suddenly they weren’t

This has a lot to do with human nature and corporate culture, but Christensen also notes that industries like newspapers are often seduced into thinking that things aren’t as bad as they seem, because their traditional business often continues to do quite well — until all of a sudden it doesn’t:

“Even as the disruption is getting more and more steam in the marketplace, the core business persists, and is really quite profitable for a very long time. Then, when the disruption gets good enough to address the needs of your customers, very quickly, all of a sudden, you go off the cliff.

Even though managers realize that disruption is occurring — even though they know it’s happening — they don’t do it, because the data becomes clear after the game is over. They really have to act on the basis of theory, which I think a lot of people find hard to do.”

So newspapers have arguably seen the writing on the wall over the past decade or so, and yet making the kinds of decisions that were required to get in front of that wave of disruption was still extremely hard, since doing so would mean potentially derailing their existing successful businesses. Although Christensen doesn’t mention it, this is likely one of the reasons why the only newspapers that have made significant strides tend to be ones that have gone bankrupt or are close to it, like the Journal Register Co. — in the most obvious sense, they have nothing else to lose.

Interestingly, Nieman Lab founder Josh Benton also notes that newspapers with strong religious affiliations have made some big moves, including the Christian Science Monitor — which was one of the first to go digital only several years ago — and the Deseret News, which Christensen mentions as a pioneer (perhaps in part because it was taken over by one of his graduate students).

The other newspaper that gets high marks for adapting quickly, or trying to do so, is the Washington Post. For Christensen, the model that the Post pursued from the earliest days of online news — with the digital unit set up as a separate entity and even located in a different building — is the one that has the best chance of success, because then it is easier for the digital operation to pursue whatever steps it needs to in order to survive. This is why so many Washington Post staffers were disappointed when it seemed as though the “printies” had won.

Taking risks and learning to fail are necessary skills

The Post has also been one of the few major dailies to take some interesting risks in the digital realm, including the creation of its Trove news-recommendation engine and the launch of the “social reader” app for Facebook, which has driven a lot of traffic to the newspaper’s site but has also been subject to the whims of the platform on which it sits. And Christensen also gives the company praise for diversifying away from the news business and into online education as a way of subsidizing its journalism (although there are critics who say this model is working less and less well for the Post).

Although Christensen doesn’t mention it, the decline and now disappearance from print of the Newsweek brand name is another great example of the processes he is trying to describe. At one time, the aggregation of a week’s worth of news was a great service for readers — something they couldn’t get anywhere else. Now, that kind of thing is available in a thousand different places, and so the purpose of Newsweek has essentially been removed. Is there a purpose for The Daily Beast, the entity that merged with (and possibly helped to kill) Newsweek? That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Forbes is another entity that gets praise from Christensen for trying to disrupt itself.

While the introduction of paywalls may be helping to delay the disruption, and prop up what remains of the traditional newspaper ad-revenue business, they don’t feel like a long-term solution to the challenge that Christensen is talking about, which is to develop a sustainable online business that solves a real problem for readers. Are readers suffering from a lack of paywalled content for which they can submit their credit cards? Probably not. It’s also interesting that the newspaper that gets the most praise from Christensen is the Post, which remains adamantly opposed to a paywall.

In the end, the only advice Christensen can provide for newspapers — or magazines, for that matter — is to aggressively cut costs in the traditional side of the business (the Deseret News cut more than 50 percent of its staff) while also investing in new digital-first businesses. So far, most newspapers are getting good at the first part of that equation, but not so good at the second.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Zarko Drincic and George Kelly

The move appeared to be inevitable after recent sensationalist covers failed to stave off a collapse in Newsweek’s business. As David Carr reports, the magazine is slated to lose $40 million this year and has seen its subscribers fall from 3 million to 1.5 million in the last decade. More broadly, the company faced a more existential problem in that a “weekly news” magazine has become an anachronism in the digital world.

In this morning’s announcement, Brown wrote that the tablet edition will target a “new highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context.” The product will be subscription based and supplemented with content from The Daily Beast, which took over Newsweek’s online brand in 2010. The relationship between the publications has been complicated since they were first mashed together in an odd 50-50 partnership.  As we reported in 2010, Brown appeared to face an insurmountable task of combining a tired magazine brand with The Daily Beast which itself was losing $10 million a year.

It’s early days, of course, but Newsweek Global appears to face an uphill battle for that coveted “mobile, opinion-leading audience.” These readers are already receiving intense attention from the likes of the Economist and The Atlantic, two publications whose brands, unlike Newsweek, have retained their sheen in the digital era. Meanwhile, other tablet-only plays like The Daily have floundered. Is it realistic for a reborn digital Newsweek to muscle into this space?

Finally, here are some reactions from around the media sphere:

End of print Newsweek may improve its journalism. Desperate newsstand covers were shameful, pandering sensationalism. No more #muslimrage?

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) October 18, 2012

In July, Tina Brown tried to knock down web-only rumors in a memo with the subject line “Scaremongering.” bit.ly/U8Irgc

— Romenesko (@romenesko) October 18, 2012

When I die, I want my obituary to say that I “transitioned to an all-digital format”.

— felix salmon (@felixsalmon) October 18, 2012

Just to recap for those who haven’t been following the drama, Ferguson — a professor of history at Harvard and the author of several books — wrote a cover story for Newsweek (which merged with Tina Brown’s online entity the Daily Beast in 2010) in which he argued that President Obama has failed to fulfill a number of promises related to the U.S. economy and therefore doesn’t deserve to be supported for reelection. The piece triggered an outpouring of criticism from a number of observers and complaints that Ferguson’s argument was based on faulty numbers and deliberate misinterpretations of the evidence.

Why is it wrong to outsource fact-checking?

Politico writer Dylan Byers has been one of those holding Ferguson’s feet to the fire for the story, saying the writer used a flawed argument based on skewed figures and arguing that Newsweek should never have let the piece see the light of day. As Byers put it:

“Newsweek has stayed silent on the controversy, choosing instead to ‘monitor the debate’ as if the editor and publisher bear no responsibility for what appears in their pages.”

Coates, meanwhile, said in his Atlantic tribute to fact-checkers that what the magazine had really done was “unwittingly outsourced its fact-checking to the web.” But is that such a bad thing? The Ferguson piece has been thoroughly fact-checked, debunked and otherwise dismantled by Byers and a host of others, including Krugman — and the Atlantic, which does a line-by-line critique of the piece and the flaws in the historian’s logic — as well as Andrew Sullivan at Newsweek’s sister publication the Daily Beast and Matthew Yglesias at Slate.

My point is this: Isn’t it better to have those criticisms and counterarguments out where readers can see them and inform themselves if they wish? And if Ferguson is the type of academic who plays fast and loose with the truth in order to make his argument, as Atlantic writer James Fallows seems to suggest he might be, isn’t it better that we know that by seeing his arguments in as clear a light as possible? If those errors or logical inconsistencies had been fixed by nameless fact-checkers at Newsweek, all we would really know is that the magazine has a good fact-checking department.

One of the most controversial aspects of the idea of “news as a process” is that in some cases it involves distributing information before the truth of that information is fully known, something I have written about before as it applied to what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio was doing during the revolutions of the Arab Spring: Carvin says he used his Twitter followers as a kind of “public newsroom” that helped him confirm and verify information coming from Egypt and elsewhere. In a similar way, Reddit and Twitter have been used as public fact-checking engines and have shown they can be very effective.

It’s valuable to see errors made and corrected

Some, including former Poynter writer Steve Myers, have made the argument that some kinds of news — such as the shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colo., where the gunman was initially linked to the Tea Party political group — shouldn’t be treated as a process, because of the risk of making serious mistakes. And others have argued that an ABC News report this week about director Tony Scott (who committed suicide) having an inoperable brain tumor should never have made it to air, because it turned out not to be true.

Obviously, no one wants publishers or media companies of any kind to just print, air or distribute information they know to be wrong. But in cases like the Aurora shooting and the revolutions in Egypt, the reality is that the availability of “true” information is in a constant state of flux. And in cases like Ferguson’s Newsweek piece, the validity of an argument like the one he is trying to make is also open to interpretation, as Krugman himself admits. So why shouldn’t that interpretation be exposed and debated in public instead of behind closed doors in some editorial office?

One point some critics have made about such an approach — including during a Twitter debate I touched off a few months ago when I asked why we need editors — is that not everyone will see or read the corrections to a report or will have the time to follow up on the allegations about a piece like Ferguson’s, and that is undoubtedly true. That is why it’s almost as important to have places that collect those kinds of things, whether it’s “Regret the Error” author Craig Silverman’s column at Poynter or next to the source of the original report, as with the Daily Beast’s list of criticisms and outlets debunking Ferguson’s piece.

In his post, Krugman describes how when he writes a column for the New York Times, he has to submit a list of links and sources for the claims he makes, which an editor then uses to test his arguments. In an ideal world, I think we’d be better off if the columnist just added those links to his column and let his readers fact-check the validity of his claims — and if others did the same. To paraphrase Jeff Jarvis: “Do your best, and let the internet do the rest.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Hans Gerwitz and Shutterstock/Swellphotography

After less than a year as publisher, Ray Chelstowski was “relieved of his duties” today, as the NYT put it, citing unidentified sources. Also, Tom Weber, the managing editor, and Edward Felsenthal, the executive editor who has been with The Daily Beast since Tina Brown introduced the online-only title three years ago, both resigned.

Chelstowski has been credited with revitalizing Time (NYSE: TWX) Inc.’s Entertainment Weekly. But with so much turnover following the sale of Newsweek to the late Sidney Harman in September 2010 for $1 (plus $47 million in liabilities), advertisers and readers have continued to retreat from the magazine.

Chelstowski is being replaced by Eric Danetz, who is joining the magazine as SVP for sales from CBS (NYSE: CBS) Interactive.

Overall, IAC posted a pretty good Q3 two weeks ago. But the media segment, which contains Newsweek/Daily Beast, saw revenues drop 37 percent year-over-year. As the economy remains mired in uncertainty, and magazines, at best, are only holding their collective heads above water these days, Newsweek/Daily Beast is unlikely to do anything more than continue to try IAC’s and its shareholders’ degree of indulgence.

As the latest figures from the Publishers Information Bureau show, Newsweek’s ad pages were down 22 percent between January and September when compared with the same period the previous year. In contrast, its closest rival Time, posted a 4.2 percent increase during that same period.

In a separate post on TDB‘s site, Newsweek veteran Jonathan Alter wrote that Harman death occurred after a brief battle with leukemia. Alter, who said that he would be leaving the publication this week, added, “it came as a shock. He was 92 and expected to live past 100. We all believed him.”

In various interviews following his purchase of Newsweek from the Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO) in September, Harman had bristled at questions regarding his age and morbid speculation about whether he would be able to actively reinvigorate Newsweek, which had been hemorrhaging revenues and readers for years. He was also often described as looking much younger and appearing much more energetic than a man 20 years his junior.

– Joining the magazine world: Although well-respected for his business acumen in electronics, Harman had never run a magazine. Since he emerged as the one of the competing buyers of Newsweek last, agreeing to ultimately pay $1 for the title and assume about $47 million in liabilities, Harman struggled to find an editor-in-chief after Jon Meacham said he would depart from that post. He also presided over a mass exodus of the staff during that period.

With his lack of media experience, he quickly sought out a partnership with Tina Brown, the founding editor of The Daily Beast. An initial attempt to merge the two publications faltered due to “misunderstandings,” in Harman’s words, about his place in a combined Newsweek and Daily Beast.

But that was all sorted out when following what Brown called a “coffee-mug toast” among the parties that had existing Daily Beast president Stephen Colvin becoming CEO while Harman would serve as executive chairman of Newsweek Daily Beast, as the new entity would be known. Harman was also given a seat on a board with IAC chairman and CEO Barry Diller. Brown will report to that board.. “I have every instinct, and Tina has blessed this, to be a participant in terms of sharing and discussing ideas, but recognizing where the editorial authority simply must stay,” Harman said, hailing Brown “one of the transcendent editors of all time.”

– Newsweek‘s and The Daily Beast‘s woes: Both Newsweek and TDB continued to be struggling — Newsweek has only six ads in this week’s issue, Business Insider noted — but Alter writes that Harman told him that the publication was in striking distance of breaking even. In addition, 16 staffers at the magazine had taken buyouts this week, according to Mediaweek.

In terms of the financials, Newsweek lost roughly $40 million over the past two years, while the two-year-old The Daily Beast lost about $10 million last year.

– Looking on the bright side: Still, there has been some positive news lately. Newsweek Daily Beast Co. just named Daniel Blackman, a former strategic partner development officer at Google (NSDQ: GOOG) from 2005 to 2007, was more recently co-founder and chief operating officer of Howcast, as its first chief digital officer, the NY Post reported. Blackman will be working on creating a single site, with Newsweek.com folded into The Daily Beast.

Colvin told the NY Post that advertising on The Daily Beast‘s site is up 367 percent in Q1, year-over-year. He added single-copy sales of Newsweek, while still a relatively small portion of overall sales, are up 57 percent since Brown’s redesign last month. While still not close to profitability, Colvin also said that this year’s losses will be down more than 60 percent from 2010.

– Remembering Harman: Harman was born on August 4, 1918 and was married to former Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA.), who resigned her seat in February, and survives him. He initially achieved fame and wealth in the audio business. As Alter writes, “In 1953 he founded Harman Kardon Inc., where he and his partner invented the concept of “hi-fi”-high fidelity sound that had previously been available only in studios.”

In a statement, Barry Diller, chairman of IAC and his partner in the Newsweek Daily Beast Co., said: “I feel very privileged to have known Dr Harman in the last year of his life. That remarkable brain, filled with so much humor poetry and wisdom, was something his new colleagues at Newsweek and The Daily Beast marveled at in every encounter. Three weeks ago, when he told me of his illness he said he and his family wanted to continue as partners in Newsweek/Beast in all events and we will carry on though will greatly miss his passionate enthusiasm and belief in the venture.”

The word comes just after The MSNBC Digital Network claimed it set a new site record of 161.7 million total online video streams in January, 2011.

The deal was initially considered to have mutual benefits. But MSNBC seems to have been doing well with its other traffic drivers, such as social net boost it got from the addition of the @BreakingNews Twitter feed.

The site also introduced a streamlined redesign and greater emphasis on video last summer, which also may have helped it attract more visitors. MSNBC has also worked with the production team Berman Braun on its Washington DC-centric politics/gossip site, BLTWY.

In contrast, the number of unique visitors to Newsweek.com has fallen off, a likely result of the mass exodus and turmoil surrounding its sale to Daily Beast parent IAC (NSDQ: IACI). Monthly uniques were at 3 million in December, down from 5 million in June, Mediaweek said, citing Compete numbers.

Original post: Once the merger between The Daily Beast and Newsweek is cemented, Newsweek.com will effectively disappear, as users who go to that site will be redirected to TDB’s homepage, the NYT reported last week. In reaction, someone (or “someones”) claiming to work for the Newsweek.com staff has created a new Tumblr page to mount a defense of the website in the hopes of preventing its extinction.

The Tumblr page’s sole post begins by expressing a degree of shock about not being told in the staff meetings held by executives that Newsweek.com existence would be coming to an end. The post also also expresses some bitterness about how the web operation has been treated over the past few years.

“The thing you have to understand about Newsweek is that it would only be fitting that its Website would be the first to go,” the post says, which does not include attribution or byline. “Like most print publications, Newsweek magazine has been led by people who deep down don’t understand the Web, and because they don’t understand it, they fear it and don’t value it.”

The post then questions the rationale given for putting The Daily Beast front and center as the new entity, which is now being called the Newsweek Daily Beast Company. Essentially, the idea is that TheDailyBeast.com, which gets about 2 million monthly uniques, would be able to sbsorb Newsweek.com’s roughly 5 million monthly users.

For one thing, the Tumblr post claims that “at least 60 percent” of Newsweek.com’s uniques come from someplace other than the homepage, finding the site’s stories either through Newsweek’s web partnership with MSNBC (NYSE: GE), or links on MSN, Newsweek’s Twitter feed, its official Tumblr page. “If less than half of Newsweek readers log onto Newsweek.com’s actual homepage, how much traffic will really be gained? Certainly not five million uniques,” the Tumblr post notes.

So far, attempts to contact Newsweek.com’s staff have gone unanswered. While Newsweek’s official Tumblr page doesn’t reference “Save Newsweek.com,” it does offer a tongue-in-cheek contrast between what sort of content lives on The Daily Beast and Newsweek.com (courtesy of CJR). The first item on the list for The Daily Beast is a post about alcoholism on broadcast TV, while Newsweek.com has a more soberly-minded column by Jonathan Alter on “Why The Midterms Matter.”