Newsweek redesigns website, moves to Amazon cloud

To cut back on expenditures, Newsweek is making some changes to the way its website is hosted. MediaWeek reports that the magazine is ceasing to host its own website, instead moving to the “cloud”—outsourcing web hosting to Amazon. Newsweek estimates this move could save them $500,000 yearly.

But that is not the only change Newsweek is making. It is entirely redesigning its website, getting rid of huge banner ads and changing to a more vertically-oriented format that MediaWeek compares to Facebook.

[Newsweek vp, general manager Geoff] Reiss acknowledged that the redesign, by Hard Candy Shell, goes against the grain. But he said it gives users what they want when they come to the Web: the ability to find information quickly. The Newsweek site made a similarly contrarian move last year when it started linking to news from elsewhere, a move meant to better serve readers even if it risked sending them off the site. “This is not a knockoff of Facebook,” Reiss said. “A clean, vertical orientation on the page was one of the goals. What we’ve seen come out of social media and blogs [is] an organization that makes sense for how people are consuming media now…brand doesn’t trump user experience.”

The article notes that, though Newsweek is not erecting a paywall now, it has been experimenting with premium content, and plans to roll out paid content later this year. It is also working on an iPad edition.