Newsweek is Time magazine’s major competitor among US weekly news magazines. Before the Internet and CNN these two publications held great power in influencing mainstream politics and thought in this country. Nowadays both are trying to reinvent themselves on the web – including the mobile web. I covered Time‘s new mobile site recently so here’s a look at Newsweeks‘ mobile offering.

Newsweek, like Time, has turned to Crisp Wireless to create their mobile site. Crisp seems to specialize in repackaging web content, particularly news, for mobile use. Mobile.newsweek.com is a typical Crisp site with around 50 articles divided into sections. Numeric accelerator keys give one click access to sections and articles. Unfortunately, Newsweek Mobile is afflicted with a bug I noted on several other Crisp sites. CSS styling is used to make selected links appear with reversed colors, white on red. Most mobile browsers ignore attempts to color links but the latest Openwave browser (Version 7 ) changes the foreground color to white while ignoring the CSS to make the background red so that the current link is rendered in unreadable white on white.

The Newsweek site is notable for including many of the magazine’s well known columnists like Pulitzer prize winner Anna Quindland and well known tech writer Steven Levy (Insanely Great, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution).

Surprisingly, Newsweek doesn’t really have it’s own website. When you go to Newsweek.com you’re redirected to a Newsweek section on MSNBC‘s site. If your using a mobile browser Newsweek.com redirects to a mobile version of the MSNBC Newsweek section. The Newsweek section within MSNBC‘s PC version is quite large with multiple news sections and over a hundred articles but the mobile edition is rather limited with only 12 stories linked from the start page. I’m rather surprised that Newsweek.com doesn’t send mobile browsers to the new and much richer in content, mobile.Newsweek.com.

Newsweek: xhtml-mp
Content: Usability: