Freedom to disagree

As the business stabilised, a deeper question emerged: what kind of publication should Newsweek be?

‘During the turnaround of Newsweek, we spent some time looking at what had made it so well regarded in the past,’ he explains. ‘It was a publication read by people across America, not just by one political group.’ Over time, he believes, that broad appeal was lost.

‘Somewhere along the line, it had become more progressive and elitist and it just lost relevance. People in the middle of the country stopped reading,’ he says.

With public trust in journalism decreasing and media audiences becoming increasingly polarised, Dev and his team made a deliberate choice: Newsweek would aim to speak to – and listen to – readers from across the political and cultural spectrum.

In practice, this has meant resisting the pressure to adopt a fixed ideological stance. ‘We present facts as fairly as possible and let readers make up their own minds,’ he says.

It has also meant creating spaces like Newsweek’s ‘Debate’ platform, where opposing views are published side by side.

Democracy depends on coexistence

As a British leader working in the American media ecosystem, Dev has the advantage of being able to bring an outsider’s perspective. ‘America is often misunderstood from the outside,’ he says. ‘It’s incredibly diverse, culturally, politically and geographically.’

That diversity, he believes, makes fair journalism both more challenging and more necessary.

‘In the UK, media tends to be more globally focused,’ he observes. ‘In the US, audiences care deeply about domestic issues. And politically, the divisions are sharper.’

He worries that social media has intensified this problem by feeding users only what they already agree with. ‘You end up living inside a confirmation-bias bubble,’ he says. ‘You start to believe the whole world thinks like you.’

For Dev, fairness doesn’t mean avoiding disagreement – it means making room for it. ‘I think we can all be guilty of believing that our view is better than others, so we shouldn’t hear other opinions,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to agree. But democracy depends on coexistence.’

Measuring fairness

One of the more unusual steps Newsweek has taken under Dev’s leadership is attempting to measure fairness itself. For a period, readers were invited to rate Newsweek articles using a ‘fairness meter’ and to offer direct feedback on whether the coverage accurately represented different perspectives.

‘It’s easy to say you’re fair,’ he says. ‘It’s much harder to test whether readers actually experience you that way.’

The results were encouraging, but for Dev, the real value of the experiment lay in strengthening accountability, not just gathering data.

‘Fairness isn’t a destination,’ he says. ‘It’s at the heart of our mission.’