How ‘Fairness’ Fueled Newsweek’s Rise as the Unlikeliest Digital Success Story of 2024

When the prevailing narrative in journalism is of the old guard flailing in the internet age, you might be surprised to learn that in terms of web traffic, the greatest current success story is Newsweek, a legacy print brand of over 90 years and counting.

As previously analyzed by VIP+, web traffic data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company that regularly tracks news and media sites, the top English-speaking news platforms showed most emerging sites leaning into partisanship and social media algorithms to build followings. But Newsweek has taken its own staggering growth to the next level precisely by how it has projected a sense of ideological fairness in recent years since coming under fire for bias and multiple controversies.

Similarweb’s U.S. web traffic data for Newsweek.com plainly shows the outlet’s immense online growth in just five years. So far this year, traffic has yet to fall below 70 million views, with October reaching 111.2 million — a nearly 120% increase compared with the 50.7 million views gained in October 2019.

That tally was preceded by a five-year high of 133.3 million views in July (a spike seen across the media industry due to several election-related events), making for a roughly 233% increase versus July 2020’s 40 million.

Like most online publications, Newsweek utilizes Google’s Discover and News feeds by publishing SEO-friendly content such as NYT game answers, viral trend recaps and the internet-bred classic “You won’t believe what happens next” headline type. Politics, or specifically making people angry over politics, always does algorithmically well, especially in an election year, with Newsweek’s political stories generating 86 million page views in 2024, up from just 32 million views in 2023, according to MediaPost.

But along with gaining online readership, Newsweek also had to contend with restoring its reputation after years of scandals and controversies.

The Washington Post Co. sold Newsweek to billionaire Sidney Harman for one U.S. dollar in 2010. He merged the outlet with the IAC-owned Daily Beast that same year. Newsweek ended its storied print edition in 2012, but that was restarted two years later after it was sold yet again to IBT Media.

In hindsight, IBT’s 2013 purchase seems to be the point where the outlet’s reputation began eroding. The first issue of Newsweek’s relaunched print edition led with a cover story on the creator of Bitcoin, which was heavily criticized for factual inaccuracies and rushed reporting in favor of a flashy, clickable headline.

The era of online growth only began in earnest after Newsweek spun off into Newsweek Publishing LLC in 2018, amid IBT Media being investigated for its ties to Christian evangelical leader David Jang and his school, Olivet University. It’s a long and strange story, but the investigation led to Newsweek’s office being raided by the Manhattan DA and editors and reporters fired for investigating further.

The resulting report on the DA raid was eventually published and led with a fiery editor’s note accusing corporate leadership of “egregious breaches of confidentiality and journalism ethics” (with former IBT Media co-owner Etienne Uzac pleading guilty to fraud and money laundering in relation to the case in 2020).

Even after splitting from IBT Media — which in itself was a legal battle that only recently resolved — the controversies continued at Newsweek. In 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center published a report accusing the publication’s Opinion section, under the leadership of conservative activist Josh Hammer, of taking “a marked radical right turn” by platforming far-right figures known for spreading misinformation and hate speech. As recently as this year, Newsweek received backlash for publishing an op-ed calling “unmarried and childless” Taylor Swift a bad role model for women.

As all of these events played out, readers, other journalists and former Newsweek employees lamented the outlet’s fall from grace and openly blamed its leadership for the decline. In turn, the reliability of Newsweek’s stories was also increasingly called into question.

Regarding these controversies, a Newsweek spokesperson said, “The unfortunate incidents of the past happened in a context that no longer reflects the values or operations of the Newsweek organization today.”

To its credit, Newsweek has made several changes in response to the controversies in an effort to win back readers’ trust. The outlet began a partnership with the Poynter Institute in 2019 to help raise its newsroom standards, and the site keeps a robust and regularly updated corrections database.

The most public initiative came in 2023 with the Newsweek Fairness Meter, which gives readers the opportunity to vote on whether a story was reported objectively or with a left- or right-leaning bias. In an article published on Poynter’s website, Newsweek EIC Nancy Cooper pitched the Fairness Meter as a way for Newsweek readers to hold its reporters accountable in a more productive way than liking or commenting. A spokesperson shared that 3.2 million votes have been cast since the Fairness Meter’s launch, with 71% of votes deeming stories “fair.”

“At a time when the internet is increasingly polarized, we’re proud of the fact that the vast majority of people who register their thoughts on Newsweek’s Fairness Meter are taking the time to approve of the work our journalists do,” the spokesperson added. “We view this as a sign of momentum in our mission to highlight common ground across divides.”

The Opinion page, now run by Batya Ungar-Sargon, prominently features a “Daily Debate” section that pits conservative and progressive takes on a given topic, as well as an entire page called “The Debate.” The spokesperson noted that “under Ungar-Sargon’s direction, Newsweek continues to fulfill its mission of platforming the full array of political and cultural viewpoints with journalistic and factual integrity.”

Newsweek’s efforts to repair its reputation seem to be paying off: Looking at the past few years of YouGov’s annual Trust in Media surveys shows that while the publication has lost some ground among those who found it “very trustworthy,” it has made meaningful gains in the “trustworthy” category and has reduced its “very untrustworthy” percentage by over half.

A look at the survey data across party lines shows Newsweek has mainly won over Republicans and Independents, with the former shrinking from 24% “very untrustworthy” in 2022 to 14% this year. Republican credibility has also nearly doubled in the same amount of time. For Democrats, “very trustworthy” fell by 3% this year, while "untrustworthy” grew a percentage point, to 5%, but those who find the site “trustworthy” has hovered around 34%-35% over the past three years.

At least for now, the data suggests that Newsweek’s efforts are working, both for increasing readership and being considered trustworthy by said readers. One could even conclude that this is the formula for news outlets to overcome the industry’s most festering reliability issues.

And yet something about these solutions feels off. To quote writer Alex Shephard, Newsweek still has a “distinctly seamy vibe” that feels distinct from its former, pre-internet self.

Take the Fairness Meter: The idea is sound, admirable even. There can be value in giving readers the ability to provide real-time feedback in a more direct and less caustic way than the average online comments.

But its current execution is lacking in the very quality it’s trying to amend: transparency. There’s no way to see the total number of votes at play, no percentage breakdown of precisely how people voted and no place for readers to expand and add nuance to their vote. (The special-made Pro-Israeli/Pro-Palestinian meter feels absurdly counterproductive for an issue as complex and emotionally charged as the Israel-Palestine conflict).

By extension, there is no way to stop people from voting that a story is unfair or biased simply because they don’t like what’s being reported. Just as viewers can glance at the number of stars on a review without reading the actual review, the Fairness Meter lets readers decide whether to take a news story seriously based on consensus rather than the facts that are being reported.

But what’s most concerning is that Newsweek — which hasn’t had full-time fact checkers in almost 30 years — has not publicly shared what, if anything, is done to amend a story that has been voted as unfair.

“While we recognize that every innovation has room for improvement, the significant increase in trust among readers, as highlighted by YouGov’s ‘Trust in Media’ reports, demonstrates the tool’s positive impact,” said a Newsweek spokesperson. “We are committed to continually refining the Fairness Meter to maximize its effectiveness in delivering fair, trustworthy news to our audience.”

We ultimately can’t prove if Newsweek readers are using the Fairness Meter responsibly, or if this increase in trust is really because their beliefs can now be validated in real time. What we do know is that the ability to vote generates clicks, which translate to engagements.

As for the Opinion section, the root problem that has led to numerous controversies — platforming and legitimizing extremist perspectives from controversial figures — remains, even if both far sides of the political spectrum are now represented. At any rate, it is well documented at this point that right-wing content tends to be favored by social media algorithms, which may become more overt as Silicon Valley embraces a second Trump presidency.

And yet the numbers don’t lie: Newsweek is thriving and climbing the ranks among the most read news outlets in the U.S. One explanation might be that it has gotten to this place not by improving its reporting or editorial standards but by learning to deliver what the internet often demands: produce never-ending content, incite strong opinions, embrace the algorithms and validate viewers’ pre-held beliefs.

As Similarweb’s web traffic data also shows, almost all of the online news platforms that have started within the last five years are openly partisan, while Pew Research Center data found that news outlets are still dependent on social media for views.

In a way, one can’t blame Newsweek for playing the game and playing it well. The site isn’t journalism’s savior, but whether we like it or not, it just might be its future.