Long rumored, it's now a fact. Mort Zuckerman's U.S. News + World Report is formally dropping out of the newsweekly race, leaving the field to Time, Newsweek, The Week and The Economist.

Next year, U.S. News will go biweekly, in a shift of focus away from news and the print title to its rankings, such as of colleges and hospitals, and toward its online properties, with their emphasis on data.

Calls to publisher Bill Holiber were not returned. A spokesperson for the magazine could not say when in 2009 the frequency change is set to occur.

As much as anything the move represents Zuckerman's desire to stem the losses of the print title, which has slipped to a distant third behind Time and Newsweek in ad sales in what's become an increasingly tough market for newsweeklies in recent years with the rise of the internet.

The question is just how much Zuckerman will invest in this repositioning of U.S. News. Or is it just another retrenchment in a series of retrenchments?

Over recent years, the magazine has suffered through a series of budget cuts on the print side, but Zuckerman has been far less willing to invest in the online side than either Time or Newsweek. And as a result the site's growth has not kept up with that of either Time or Newsweek.

In terms of ad pages, the print edition of U.S. News saw a decline of 37.5 percent over the first three months of 2008, according to Publishers Information Bureau.

But it was a particularly rough time for all magazines and newsweeklies in particular as the effects of the ad slowdown took deeper hold. Time was down 18 percent and Newsweek 14 percent, with the category as a whole down 14 percent.

In 2007, according to PIB, the newsweekly category was down just 2 percent. U.S. News was off nearly 5 percent, while Time and Newsweek were down close to 7 percent.

The only gainers were The Week and The Economist, up 5 percent and more than 8 percent, respectively.

U.S. News's move to a biweekly frequency has been in the works for some time.

Just a few years back, it published just two double issues per year, for a total of 50. That figure crept up to a half-dozen during the last ad recession earlier in the decade. This year the magazine is set to run 16 double issues, for a total of just 36 issues for the year.