Baba Shetty, CEO of Newsweek announced this back in October:
We are announcing this morning an important development at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the United States will be our Dec. 31 issue.
From the comments of The Verge article:
That was predicted several years ago when magazine sales took a big dive, though that was largely due to the decline in ad sales caused by the recession scare that swept across the boardrooms where ad budgets seemed like a good place to save money. Magazines have seen growth over the last couple years, however the large news titles suffer, and will likely continue to. Nobody has ever wanted to read yesterday’s news when you can have today’s.
Print isn’t going to die the swift death that follows the swift comments like “print is dead”, it will be gradual, and it won’t impact all publications the same. There will be a place for some segments, and they will see growth, as they already have. But the ones who will survive will need to adapt to do so, they will need to abandon efforts to be sources of new coverage and focus on being the source of news, focusing the editorial direction toward features that can be relevant longer than a website will keep its features on its landing pages.