For generations, Time and Newsweek fought to define the national news agenda every Monday on the newsstand. Before the Internet, before cable news, before People magazine, what the newsweeklies put on their covers mattered.
As the American conversation has become harder to sum up in a single cover, that era seems to be ending. The Washington Post Company announced Wednesday that it would sell Newsweek, raising questions about the future of the newsweekly, first published 77 years ago, Stephanie Clifford reports in The New York Times.
Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post Company, said in an interview that the decision was purely economic.
“I did not want to do this, but it is a business,” he said. The magazine would lose money in 2010, he said, and “we don’t see a sustained path to profitability for Newsweek.”
It may be fun to indulge in nostalgia as regards to Newsweek and Time. Their era has passed. Today there really isn’t much of a market for what they are selling. I think the Washington Post Company ought to give the magazine another look at ending its life.
I used to subscribe to Newsweek back in the late 1970s, but I really don’t miss it. So much more (and more up to date) info is now available on the web these days. But I especially don’t miss its religion coverage since Jon Meacham took over as chief editor and turned the magazine in an even more liberal direction.
David Handy+
The problem is not the magazine genre, good magazines survive. The problem is the content which has gone from a reasoned and in-depth analysis of the news to left wing political commentary on the news. We have an expiring subscription. The magazine goes directly to the trash, unread.
I dropped my subscription years ago. Newsweek had become just another Leftist propaganda venue. I wrote to them, hoping for balance in their presentations, but after waiting…and waiting, it only got worse. So, there you go. The Leftist media bastions are falling as the nation continues to recoil from the radical Left. It’s too bad. They were once a respected periodical. Like the NY Times, they just can’t abandon their Leftist ideology enough to present fair and balanced coverage of the news. They always have to spin it, ignore it, or sensationalize it to further the Leftist cause. Now they will learn the hard way that you can’t eat your ideology.
Now if only NPR would follow suit. Their coverage of the Arizona law on illegal aliens was beyond slanted and into lying.
Maybe “The National Enquirer” will buy them. That’s the level it has degenerated to.
I quit reading those glossy, but very biased, magazines YEARS before there was anything called “The Internet”. I have often lamented since that there should be some similar magazine that wouldn’t insult all that I hold dear and hold out ideals that any mobster could appreciate.
No, their demise is a non-story.
Don
Decline?
Newsweek has the same basic demographic as TEC. No need to say more.
Yet not all info magazines need decline. Especially if they are providing a product and service that people need/want. An example: 10 years ago the National Rifle Association started “Freedom First”, a monthly magazine which reports on 2nd amendment issues and other related news stories. It has been and continues to be a rousing success and is something I read cover to cover almost the day it shows up in the mailbox. My mother still receives Newsweek (we get her mail here at the house) and I almost feel like putting on latex gloves before touching it.
#8 “Freedom First†is an excellent magazine. I have the same reaction to it that you do…cover to cover the day it arrives.